
Class FRjjij- 
Book 



SOME DIVERSIONS OF A 
MAN OF LETTERS 




Northern Studies. 1879. 
Life of Gray. 1 882. 
Seventeenth-Century Studies. 1883. 
Life of Congreve. 1888. 

A History of Eighteenth-Century Literature. 1899. 

Life of Philip Henry Gosse, F.R.S. 1 890. 

Gossip in a Library. 1 891. 

The Secret of Narcisse: a Romance. 1892. 

Questions at Issue. 1893. 

Critical Kit-Kats. 1 896. 

A Short History of Modern English Literature. 
1897. 

Life and Letters of John Donne. 1 899. 

Hypolym pi a. 1 90 1 . 

Life of Jeremy Taylor. 1904. 

French Profiles. 1904. 

Life of Sir Thomas Browne. 1905. 

Father and Son. 1 907. 

Life of Ibsen. 1908. 

Two Visits to Denmark. 191 1. 

Collected Poems. 1 9 1 1 . 

Portraits and Sketches. 1 9 1 2 . 

Inter Arma. 1916. 

7^ra? French Moralists. 1 9 1 8 . 



SOME 

DIVERSIONS 

OF 

A MAN OF LETTERS 

EDMUND GOSSE, C.B. 



NEW YORK 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 
1919 




Printed in Great Britain 



TO 

EVAN CHARTERIS 



CONTENTS 



PAGE 

Preface: On Fluctuations of Taste i 

The Shepherd of the Ocean . . . .13 

The Songs of Shakespeare ..... 29 

Catharine Trotter, the Precursor of the Blue- 
stockings ....... 37 

The Message of the Wartons . . 63 

The Charm of Sterne . . . . 91 

The Centenary of Edgar Allen Poe . . .101 

The Author of "Pelham" . . . . . 115 

The Challenge of the Brontes . . . 1$$ 

Disraeli's Novels . . . . . .151 

Three Experiments in Portraiture — 

I. Lady Dorothy Nevill . . . .181 

II. Lord Cromer . . . . . .196 

III. The Last Days of Lord Redesdale . .216 

The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy . . 231 

Some Soldier Poets ...... 259 

The Future of English Poetry . . . .287 

The Agony of the Victorian Age . . 311 

Index 338 

vii 



PREFACE: 
ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE 



PREFACE: 



ON FLUCTUATIONS OF TASTE 

When Voltaire sat down to write a book on Epic Poetry, 
he dedicated his first chapter to " Differences of Taste in 
Nations/' A critic of to-day might well find it necessary, 
on the threshold of a general inquiry, to expatiate on 
" Differences of Taste in Generations/' Changes of stan- 
dard in the arts are always taking place, but it is only 
with advancing years, perhaps, that we begin to be embar- 
rassed by the recurrence of them. In early youth we fight 
for the new forms of art, for the new aesthetic shibboleths, 
and in that happy ardour of battle we have no time or 
inclination to regret the demigods whom we dispossess. 
But the years glide on, and, behold ! one morning, we 
wake up to find our own predilections treated with con- 
tempt, and the objects of our own idolatry consigned to 
the waste-paper basket. Then the matter becomes serious, 
and we must either go on struggling for a cause inevitably 
lost, or we must give up the whole matter in indifference. 
This week I read, over the signature of a very clever and 
very popular literary character of our day, the remark that 
Wordsworth's was " a genteel mind of the third rank." 
I put down the newspaper in which this airy dictum 
was printed, and, for the first time, I was glad that poor 
Mr. Matthew Arnold was no longer with us. But, of course, 
the evolutions of taste must go on, whether they hurt 
the living and the dead, or no. 

3 



4 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Is there, then, no such thing as a permanent element 
of poetic beauty ? The curious fact is that leading critics 
in each successive generation are united in believing that 
there is, and that the reigning favourite conforms to it. The 
life of a reputation is like the life of a plant, and seems, 
in these days, to be like the life of an annual. We watch 
the seed, admiration for Wordsworth, planted about 1795, 
shoot obscurely from the ground, and gradually clothe 
itself with leaves till about 1840; then it bursts into 
blossom of rapturous praise, and about 1870 is hung with 
clusters of the fruit of " permanent M appreciation. In 
1919, little more than a century from its first evolution 
in obscurity, it recedes again in the raggedness of obloquy, 
and cumbers the earth, as dim old " genteel " Wordsworth, 
whom we are assured that nobody reads. But why were 
" the best judges" scornful in 1800 and again in 1919 of 
what gave the noblest and the most inspiriting pleasure to 
" the best judges " in 1870? The execution of the verse 
has not altered, the conditions of imagination seem the same, 
why then is the estimate always changing ? Is every form 
of poetic taste, is all trained enjoyment of poetry, merely 
a graduated illusion which goes up and down like a wave 
of the sea and carries " the best judges" with it? If 
not, w T ho is right, and who is wrong, and what is the use 
of dogmatising? Let us unite to quit all vain ambition, 
and prefer the jangle of the music-halls, with its direct 
" aesthetic thrill." 

So far as I know, the only philosopher who has dared 
to face this problem is Mr. Balfour, in the brilliant second 
chapter of his " Foundations of Belief." He has there 
asked, " Is there any fixed and permanent element in 
beauty?" The result of his inquiry is disconcerting; 
after much discussion he decides that there is not. Mr. 
Balfour deals, in particular, with only two forms of art, 
Music and Dress, but he tacitly includes the others with 



Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 5 



them. It is certain that the result of his investigations 
is the singularly stultifying one that we are not permitted 
to expect " permanent relations" in or behind the feeling 
of poetic beauty, which may be indifferently awakened by 
Blake to-day and by Hayley to-morrow. If the critic 
says that the verse of Blake is beautiful and that of Hayley 
is not, he merely " expounds case-made law." The result 
seems to be that no canons of taste exist; that what are 
called "laws" of style are enacted only for those who 
make them, and for those whom the makers can bully 
into accepting their legislation, a new generation of law- 
breakers being perfectly free to repeal the code. Southey 
yesterday and Keats to-day; why not Southey again 
to-morrow, or perhaps Tupper? Such is the cynical 
cul-de-sac into which the logic of a philosopher drives 
us. 

We have had in France an example of volte-face in taste 
which I confess has left me gasping. I imagine that if 
Mr. Balfour was able to spare a moment from the con- 
sideration of fiscal reform, he must have spent it in 
triumphing over the fate of M. Sully-Prudhomme. In the 
month of September 1906 this poet closed, after a pro- 
tracted agony, " that long disease, his life." He had 
compelled respect by his courage in the face of hopeless 
pain, and, one might suppose, some gratitude by the 
abundance of his benefactions. His career was more than 
blameless, it was singularly exemplary. Half-blind, half- 
paralysed, for a long time very poor, pious without fanati- 
cism, patient, laborious, devoted to his friends, he seems 
to have been one of those extraordinary beings whose 
fortitude in the face of affliction knows no abatement. 
It would be ridiculous to quote any of these virtues as a 
reason for admiring the poetry of Sully-Prudhomme. I 
mention them merely to show that there was nothing in 
his personal temperament to arouse hatred or in his 



6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



personal conditions to excuse envy. Nothing to account 
for the, doubtless, entirely sincere detestation which his 
poetry seemed to awaken in all " the best minds' ' directly 
he was dead. 

As every one knows, from about 1870 to 1890, Sully- 
Prudhomme was, without a rival, the favourite living poet 
of the French. Victor Hugo was there, of course, until 
1885 — and posthumously until much later — but he was a 
god, and the object of idolatry. All who loved human 
poetry, the poetry of sweetness and light, took Sully- 
Prudhomme to their heart of hearts. The Stances et Poemes 
of 1865 had perhaps the warmest welcome that ever the 
work of a new poet had in France. Th6ophile Gautier 
instantly pounced upon Le Vase Brise (since too-famous) 
and introduced it to a thousand school-girls. Sainte-Beuve, 
though grown old and languid, waked up to celebrate the 
psychology and the music of this new poetry, so delicate, 
fresh and transparent. An unknown beauty of extreme 
refinement seemed to have been created in it, a beauty 
made up of lucidity, pathos and sobriety. Readers who 
are now approaching seventy will not forget with what 
emotion they listened, for instance, to that dialogue 
between the long-dead father and the newly-buried son, 
which closes : — 

" y ai laisse ma soeur et ma mere 
Et les beaux livres que j' ai lus ; 
Vous n'avez pas de bru, mon pere, 
On m'a blesse, je n'aime plus." 

" De tes a'ieux compte le nombre, 
Va baiser leurs fronts inconnus, 
Et viens faire ton lit dans Tombre 
A cote des derniers venus. 

" Ne pleure pas, dors dans l'argile 
En esperant le grand reveil." 
" O pere, qu'il est difficile 
De ne plus penser au soleil ! ' * 



Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 7 



This body of verse, to which was presently added fresh 
collections — Les Epreuves (1886), Les Vaines Tendresses 
(1875), Le Prisme (1886), — was welcomed by the elder 
Sanhedrim, and still more vociferously and unanimously 
by the younger priesthood of criticism. It pleased the 
superfine amateurs of poetry, it was accepted with enthu- 
siasm by the thousands who enjoy without analysing their 
enjoyment. In 1880, to have questioned that Sully- 
Prudhomme was a very noble poet would have been like 
challenging Tennyson in 1870, or Cowley in 1660. Jules 
Lemaitre claimed that he was the greatest artist in symbols 
that France had ever produced. Bruneti&re, so seldom 
moved by modern literature, celebrated with ardour the 
author of Les Vaines Tendresses as having succeeded 
better than any other writer who had ever lived in trans- 
lating into perfect language the dawn and the twilight of 
emotion. That Gaston Paris and M. Anatole France com- 
peted in lofty praise of the lyrics of Sully-Prudhomme, is 
perhaps less remarkable than that Paul Verlaine, whom 
all the younger schools still look upon as their apostle 
and guide, declared, in reviewing Les Ecuries d'Augias, 
that the force of style of Sully-Prudhomme was excelled 
only by the beauty of his detail. It is needless to multiply 
examples of the unanimous praise given by the divers 
schools of criticism to Sully-Prudhomme up to about 1890. 
His was, perhaps, the least contested literary glory of 
France. 

His death startlingly reminded us that this state of 
things had to be entirely reversed. It is true that the 
peculiar talent of Sully-Prudhomme, being almost exclu- 
sively lyrical, scarcely survived his youth, and that he 
cumbered his moon of sands with two huge and clumsy 
wrecks, La Justice (1878) and Le Bonheur (1888), round 
which the feet of the fairies could hardly be expected to 
trip. One must be an academician and hopelessly famous 



8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



before one dares to inflict two elephantine didactic epics 
on one's admirers. Unfortunately, too, the poet under- 
took to teach the art of verse in his Reflexions (1892), 
and his Testament Poetique (1901), brochures which greatly 
irritated the young. It is probably wise for academicians, 
whether poets or the reverse, to sit beside their nectar, 
and not to hurl bolts down into the valley. But, behind 
these errors of judgment, there they remain — those early 
volumes, which seemed to us all so full of exquisite little 
masterpieces. Why is it that nobody, except a few elderly 
persons, any longer delights in them ? The notices which 
Sully-Prudhomme' s death awakened in the Paris Press 
were either stamped with the mark of old contemporary 
affection, or else, when they were not abusive, were as 
frigid as the tomb itself. " Ses tendresses sucr^es, siru- 
peuses, sont vaines en effet," said a critic of importance ! 
Indeed, it would appear so ; and where are the laurels of 
yester-year ? 

To those who were young when Sully-Prudhomme 
entered into his immortality it seems impossible to realise 
that the glory has already departed. Gaston Paris cele- 
brated " the penetrating sincerity and the exquisite expres- 
sion of feeling" which distinguished Sully-Prudhomme 
above all other poets. He was the bard of the inner life, 
sincere and dignified, full of melancholy reverie. A great 
critic compared La Voie Lactee and Les Stalactites- with 
the far-off sound of bells heard down some lovely valley 
in a golden afternoon. Yet the images and the language 
were precise ; Sully-Prudhomme was a mathematician, and 
if he was reproached with anything like a fault, it was 
that his style was slightly geometrical. It would be otiose 
to collect any more tributes to his genius, as it appeared 
to all Frenchmen, cultivated or semi-cultivated, about the 
year 1880. With an analysis of Sully-Prudhomme' s poetry 
I am not here concerned, but with the question of why 



Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 9 



it is that such an authority as Remy de Gourmont could, 
in 1907, without awakening any protest among persons 
under fifty say that it was a " sort of social crime" to 
impose such balderdash as the verse of Sully-Prudhomme 
on the public. 

It is not needful to quote other living critics, who may 
think such prolongation of their severities ungraceful. 
But a single contrast will suffice. When, in 1881, Sully- 
Prudhomme was elected to the French Academy, expert 
opinion throughout the Press was unanimous in admitting 
that this was an honour deservedly given to the best lyric 
poet of the age. In 1906, when a literary journal sent 
out this question, " Who is the poet you love best?" 
and was answered by more than two hundred writers of 
verse, the diversity of opinion was indeed excessive ; such 
poets as Sainte-Beuve, as Brizeux, as Rodenbach, received 
votes, all the great masters received many. But Sully- 
Prudhomme, alone, received not one vote. A new genera- 
tion had arisen, and one of its leaders, with cruel wit, 
transferred to the reputation of the author his own most 
famous line : — " N'y touchez pas, il est brise." 

It is necessary to recollect that we, are not dealing with 
the phenomenon of the inability of very astute literary 
people to recognise at once a startling new sort of beauty. 
When Robert Browning lent the best poems of Keats to 
Mrs. Carlyle, she read them and returned them with the 
remark that " almost any young gentleman with a sweet 
tooth might be expected to write such things." Mrs. 
Carlyle was a very clever woman, but she was not quite 
" educated up to" Keats. The history of letters is full 
of these grotesque limitations of taste, in the presence of 
great art which has not yet been " classed." But we are 
here considering the much stranger and indeed extremely 
disconcerting case of a product which has been accepted, 
with acclamation, by the judges of one generation, and is 



io Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



contemptuously hooted out of court by the next. It is 
not, on this- occasion, Sully-Prudhomme whom we are 
considering, but his critics. If Theophile Gautier was 
right in 1867, Remy de Gourmont must have been wrong 
in 1907 ; yet they both were honourable men in the world 
of criticism. Nor is it merely the dictum of a single 
man, which, however ingenious, may be paradoxical. It is 
worse than that ; it is the fact that one whole generation 
seems to have agreed with Gautier, and that another 
whole generation is of the same mind as R6my de 
Gourmont. 

Then it is that Mr. Balfour, like Galuppi with his " cold 
music," comes in and tells us that this is precisely what 
we have to expect. All beauty consists in" the possession 
of certain relations, which being withdrawn, beauty dis- 
appears from the object that seemed to possess it. There 
is no permanent element in poetic excellence. We are 
not to demand any settled opinion about poetry. So 
Mr. Balfour seems to creak it, and we want the heart to 
scold. But is it quite so certain that there is no fixed 
norm of beauty imaginable? Is it the fact that poetic 
pleasure cannot " be supposed to last any longer than the 
transient reaction between it " and the temporary prejudice 
of our senses ? If this be true, then are critics of all men 
most miserable. 

Yet, deeply dejected as it leaves me to know that very 
clever people despise the " genteel third-rate mind" of 
Wordsworth, I am not quite certain that I yield to Mr. 
Balfour's brilliant and paralysing logic. That eminent 
philosopher seems to say " you find the poets, whom you 
revered in your youth, treated with contempt in your old 
age. Well ! It is very sad, and perhaps it would annoy 
me too, if I were not a philosopher. But it only shows 
how right I was to tell you not to expect permanent 
relations behind the feeling of beauty, since all is illusion, 



Preface : On Fluctuations of Taste 1 1 



and there is no such thing as a principle of taste, but 
only a variation of fashion/' 

Is it, however, quite so certain, after all, that there is 
no standard? It must be admitted that there seems to 
be no fixed rule of taste, not even a uniformity of practice 
or general tendency to agreement in particular cases. But 
the whole study of the fine arts would lead to despair if 
we allowed ourselves to accept this admission as implying 
that no conceivable principle of taste exists. We may not 
be able to produce it, like a yard-measure, and submit 
works of imagination to it, once and for all, in the eyes 
of a consternated public. But when we observe, as we 
must allow, that art is no better at one age than at another, 
but only different; that it is subject to modification, but 
certainly not to development; may we not safely accept 
this stationary quality as a proof that there does exist, 
out of sight, unattained and unattainable, a positive norm 
of poetic beauty? We cannot define it, but in each 
generation all excellence must be the result of a relation 
to it. It is the moon, heavily wrapt up in clouds, and 
impossible exactly to locate, yet revealed by the light it 
throws on distant portions of the sky. At all events, it 
appears to me that this is the only theory by which we 
can justify a continued interest in literature when it is 
attacked, now on one side, now on another, by the 
vicissitudes of fashion. 

The essays which are here collected deal, for the most 
part, with figures in the history of English literature which 
have suffered from the changes of fortune and the in- 
stability of taste. In every case, there has been some- 
thing which is calculated to attract the sympathy and 
interest of one who, like myself, has been closely concerned 
with two distinct but not unrelated branches of his subject, 
the literary character and the literary craft. More than 
fifty years have passed — like a cloud, like a dream ! — since 



12 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



I first saw my name printed below a passage of critical 
opinion. How many reputations, within that half-century, 
have not been exalted, how many have not been depressed ! 
We have seen Tennyson advanced beyond Virgil and Victor 
Hugo beyond Homer. We have seen the latest freak of 
futurism preferred to The Lotus Eaters, and the first Ldgende 
des Siecles rejected as unreadable. In face of this whirl- 
wind of doctrine the public ceases to know whether it is 
on its head or its feet — " its trembling tent all topsy-turvy 
wheels," as an Elizabethan has it. To me it seems that 
security can only be found in an incessant exploration of 
the by-ways of literary history and analysis of the vagaries 
of literary character. To pursue this analysis and this 
exploration without bewilderment and without prejudice 
is to sum up the pleasures of a life devoted to books. 

August 1919. 



THE SHEPHERD OF THE 
OCEAN 



THE SHEPHERD OF THE 
OCEAN 1 

Three hundred years have gone by to-day since Sir 
Walter Raleigh was beheaded, in presence of a vast throng 
of spectators, on the scaffold of Old Palace Yard in West- 
minster. General Gordon said that England is what her 
adventurers have made her, and there is not in all English 
history a more shining and violent specimen of the adven- 
turous type than Raleigh. I am desired to deliver a brief 
panegyric on this celebrated freebooter, and I go behind 
the modern definition of the word " panegyric' 1 (as a 
pompous and ornamented piece of rhetoric) to its original 
significance, which was, as I take it, the reminder, to a 
great assembly of persons, of the reason why they have 
been brought together in the name of a man long dead. 
Therefore I shall endeavour, in the short space of time 
allotted to me, not so much to eulogise as to explain and 
to define what Sir Walter Raleigh was and represents. 

I suggest, therefore, before we touch upon any of the 
details of his career and character, that the central feature 
of Raleigh, as he appears to us after three hundred years, 
is his unflinching determination to see the name of England 
written across the forehead of the world. Others before 
him had been patriots of the purest order, but Raleigh 
was the first man who laid it down, as a formula, that 
" England shall by the favour of God resist, repel and 

1 Address delivered at the Mansion House, October 29th, 191 8, 
on occasion of the Tercentenary of Sir Walter Raleigh's death. 

15 



x5 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



confound all whatsoever attempts against her sacred king- 
dom." He had no political sense nor skill in statecraft. 
For that we go to the Burghleys or the Cecils, crafty men 
of experierice and judgment. But he understood that 
England had enemies and that those enemies must be 
humbled and confounded. He understood that the road 
of England's greatness, which was more to him than all 
other good things, lay across the sea. The time was ripe 
for the assertion of English liberty, of English ascendancy, 
too; and the opportunity of the moment lay in "those 
happy hands which the Holy Ghost hath guided/' the 
fortunate adventurers. Of these Raleigh was the most 
eminent as he was also, in a sense, the most unfortunate. 

A heavy shadow lay all over the Western world, the 
shadow of a fierce bird of prey hovering over its victim. 
Ever since Ferdinand expelled the Moors out of Granada, 
Spain had been nursing insensate dreams of universal 
empire. She was endeavouring to destroy the infant 
system of European civilisation by every means of brutality 
and intrigue which the activity of her arrogance could 
devise. The Kings of Spain, in their ruthless ambition, 
encouraged their people in a dream of Spanish world- 
dominion. Their bulletins had long " filled the earth with 
their vainglorious vaunts, making great appearance of 
victories" ; they had spread their propaganda " in sundry 
languages in print,' ' distributing braggart pamphlets in 
which they boasted, for the benefit of neutrals, of their 
successes against England, France, and Italy. They had 
" abused and tormented" the wretched inhabitants of the 
Low Countries, and they held that the force of arms which 
they brandished would weigh against justice, humanity, 
and freedom in the servitude which they meant to inflict 
upon Europe. It was to be Spanien uber alles. 

But there was one particular nation against which the 
malignity of the great enemy blazed most fiercely. The 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 17 



King of Spain blasphemously regarded himself as the 
instrument of God, and there was one country which more 
than the rest frustrated his pious designs. This was 
England, and for that reason England was more bitterly 
hated than any other enemy. The Spaniards did " more 
greedily thirst after English blood than after the lives of 
any other people of Europe.' ' The avowed purpose of 
Castile was to destroy that maritime supremacy of England 
on which the very existence of the English State depends. 
The significance of Sir Walter Raleigh consists in the 
clairvoyance with which he perceived and the energy with 
which he combated this monstrous assumption. Other 
noble Englishmen of his time, and before his time, had 
been clear-sighted and had struck hard against the evil 
tyranny of Spanish dynastic militarism, but no other man 
before or since was so luminously identified with resistance. 
He struts upon the stage of battle with the limelight full 
upon him. The classic writing of the crisis is contained 
in the Last Fight of the Revenge at Sea of 1591, where the 
splendid defiance and warning of the Preface are like 
trumpets blown to the four quarters of the globe. Raleigh 
stands out as the man who above all others laboured, as 
he said, " against the ambitious and bloody pretences of 
the Spaniards, who, seeking to devour all nations, shall 
be themselves devoured/ ' 

There is a blessing upon the meek of the earth, but I 
do not present Raleigh to you as a humble-minded man. 
In that wonderful Elizabethan age there were blossoming, 
side by side, the meekness of Hooker, the subtlety of 
Bacon, the platonic dream of Spenser, the imperturbable 
wisdom of Shakespeare. Raleigh had no part in any of 
these, and to complain of that would be to grumble because 
a hollyhock is neither a violet nor a rose. He had his 
enemies during his life and his detractors ever since, and 
we may go so far as to admit that he deserves them. He 
c 



1 8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



was a typical man of that heroic age in that he possessed, 
even to excess, all its tropic irregularity of ethics. He 
lived in a perpetual alternation of thunderstorm and 
blazing sunshine. He admitted himself that his " reason/' 
by which he meant his judgment, " was exceeding weak," 
and his tactlessness constantly precluded a due appreciation 
of his courage and nobility. For long years his violent 
and haughty temper made him the most unpopular man 
in England, except in Devonshire, where everybody doted 
on him. He was " a man of desperate fortunes/ 1 and he 
did not shrink from violent methods. In studying his life 
we are amused, we are almost scandalised, at his snake- 
like quality. He moves with serpentine undulations, and 
the beautiful hard head is lifted from ambush to strike 
the unsuspecting enemy at sight. With his protestations, 
his volubility, his torrent of excuses, his evasive pertinacity, 
Sir Walter Raleigh is the very opposite of the " strong 
silent M type of soldier which the nineteenth century 
invented for exclusive British consumption. 

In judging his character we must take into consideration 
not only the times in which he lived, but the leaders of 
English policy with whom he came into collision. He was 
not thirty years of age, and still at the height of his vivacity, 
when he was taken into the close favour of Queen Elizabeth. 
There can be no question that he found in the temper of 
the monarch something to which his own nature intimately 
responded. The Queen was an adventurer at heart, as he 
was, and she was an Englishman of Englishmen. We 
are accustomed to laugh at the extravagance of the homage 
which Raleigh paid to a woman old enough to be his 
mother, at the bravado which made him fling his new 
plush cloak across a puddle for the Queen to tread over 
gently, as Fuller tells us, " rewarding him afterwards with 
many suits for his so free and seasonable tender of so fair 
a footcloth/ , or at the story of the rhymes the couple cut 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 



10 



on the glass with their diamond rings. In all this, no 
doubt, there was the fashion of the time, and on Raleigh's 
part there was ambition and the desire to push his fortunes 
without scruple. But there was, you may be sure, more 
than that; there was the instinctive sympathy between 
the two who hated with the most unflagging and the most 
burning hate the wicked aggression of Spain. We may 
be sure that Elizabeth never for a day forgot that Pope 
Alexander VI. had generously bestowed the Western world 
on the Crown of Spain. Raleigh spoke a language which 
might be extravagant and which might be exasperating, 
which might, in fact, lead to outrageous quarrels between 
his Cynthia and himself, but which, at least, that Cynthia 
understood. 

But in 1602, when Raleigh was fifty years of age and 
had his splendours behind him, there came another Pharaoh 
who knew not Joseph. James I. was the type of the 
cautious man who only looks to the present, who hopes 
by staving off a crisis till Tuesday that something fresh 
will " turn up" by Wednesday. He was disposed, from 
the very first, to distrust and to waylay the plans of 
Raleigh. We are told, and can well believe it, that he 
was " diffident " of Sir Walter's designs. He was uncom- 
fortable in the presence of that breezy " man of desperate 
fortunes/' A very excellent example of the opposition of 
the two types is offered by the discussion about the golden 
city of Manoa. Raleigh believed, and after all disappoint- 
ments continued to be sure, that in the heart of the swamps 
of the Orinoco there existed a citadel of magnificent wealth, 
an emporium of diamonds and gold, from which Spain 
was secretly drawing the riches with which she proposed 
to overwhelm civilisation. He struggled for nearly a 
quarter of a century to win this marvellous city for England. 
James I. chopped in with his cold logic, and declined to 
believe that any golden mine existed in Guiana " anywhere 



2C Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



in nature," as he craftily said. When Raleigh returned 
after his last miserable failure in May 1617, the monarch 
spared no sneer and no reproof to the pirate of the seas. 
Of course, the King was right; there was no mine of 
diamonds, no golden city. But the immense treasures 
that haunted Raleigh's dreams were more real than reality ; 
they existed in the future; he looked far ahead, and our 
sympathies to-day, and our gratitude also, are all for the 
noble and valorous knight who sailed out into the West 
searching for an unknown El Dorado. 

It is not so easy to defend the character of our hero 
against those who, like Hume, have objected to his methods 
in the prosecution of his designs. To Hume, as to many 
others before and since, Raleigh seemed " extremely defec- 
tive either in solid understanding, or morals, or both." 
The excellent historians of the eighteenth century could 
not make up their minds whether he was a hero or an 
impostor. Did he believe in the Guiana mine, or was he, 
through all those strenuous years, hoodwinking the world ? 
Had he any purpose, save to plunder the Spaniard ? Per- 
haps his own family doubted his sanity, for his son Walter, 
when he charged the Spanish settlement at San Thome, 
pointed to the house of the little colony and shouted to 
his men : " Come on, this is the true mine, and none but 
fools would look for any other ! " Accusations of bad 
faith, of factious behaviour, of disloyal intrigue, were 
brought up against Sir Walter over and over again during 
the " day of his tempestuous life, drawn on into an evening " 
of ignominy and blood. These charges were the " inmost 
and soul-piercing wounds " of which he spoke, still " aching/ ' 
still " uncured." 

There is no need to recount to you the incidents of his 
life, but I may remind you that after the failure of the 
latest expedition to South America the Privy Council, 
under pressure from the Spanish Ambassador, gave orders 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 



21 



to Sir Lewis Stukeley to bring the body of Sir Walter 
Raleigh speedily to London. This was the culmination of 
his fall, since, three days after Raleigh landed at Plymouth, 
the King had assured Spain that " not all those who 
have given security for Raleigh can save him from the 
gallows/ ' His examination followed, and the publication 
of the Apology for the Voyage to Guiana, The trial dragged 
on, while James I., in a manner almost inconceivable, 
allowed himself to be hurried and bullied by the insolent 
tyrant Philip II. If the English King did not make haste 
to execute Raleigh the Spaniards would fetch him away 
and hang him in Madrid. In these conditions, and clutch- 
ing at life as a man clutches at roots and branches when 
he is sliding down a precipice, the conduct of Raleigh has 
given cause to his critics to blaspheme. He wriggled like 
an eel, he pretended to be sick, he pretended to be mad, 
in order to protract his examination. He prevaricated 
about his mine, about the French alliance, about the 
Spanish treaties, about his stores and instruments. Did 
he believe, or did he not believe, in the Empire of the 
Inca, in the Amazons or Republic of Women, in the gold 
lying hidden in the hard white spar of El Dorado? We 
do not know, and his own latest efforts at explanation 
only cloud our counsel. He was perhaps really a little mad 
at last, his feverish brain half-crazed by the movement on 
land and sea of the triumphant wealth of Spain. 

Let us never overlook that the master-passion of his 
whole career was hatred of this tyrannous prosperity of 
England's most formidable rival. He acted impulsively, 
and even unjustly; there was much in his methods that 
a cool judgment must condemn ; but he was fighting, with 
his back to the wall, in order that the British race should 
not be crowded out of existence by " the proud Iberian/' 
He saw that if Spain were permitted to extend her military 
and commercial supremacy unchecked, there would be an 



22 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



end to civilisation. Democracy was a thing as yet un- 
developed, but the seeds of it were lying in the warm 
soil of English liberty, and Raleigh perceived, more vehe- 
mently than any other living man, that the complete 
victory of Spain would involve the shipwreck of England's 
hopes of future prosperity. Nor was he exclusively 
interested in England, though all his best hopes were ours. 
When he had been a lad at Oxford he had broken away 
from his studies in 1569 to help the Protestant princes as 
a gentleman volunteer in France, and he took part in the 
famous battle of Jarnac. He is supposed to have fought 
in France for six years. From early youth his mind was 
" bent on military glory/' and always in opposition to 
Spain. His escape from the bloody Vespers of Saint 
Bartholomew had given him a deep distrust of the policy 
of Rome. The Spaniard had "abused and tormented" 
the wretched inhabitants of Flanders. Sir Walter Raleigh 
dreamed that by the combination in arms of England, 
France, and the Low Countries, the Spaniards " might not 
only be persuaded to live in peace, but all their swelling 
and overflowing streams might be brought back into their 
natural channels and old banks." 

Raleigh stood out, as he put it himself, against ■* the 
continuance of this boundless ambition in mortal men." 
The rulers in Madrid, transported by their own arrogance, 
had determined to impose their religion, their culture, their 
form of government, on the world. It was a question 
whether the vastly superior moral and intellectual energy 
of England and France would not be crushed beneath the 
heel of Spain. Raleigh was ready to sacrifice everything, 
to imperil his own soul, to prevent that. He says you 
might as well " root out the Christian religion altogether" 
as join " the rest of all Europe to Spain." In his zeal to 
prevent " the continuance of this boundless ambition in 
mortal men," he lent himself to acts which we must not 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 23 



attempt to condone. There is no use in trying to explain 
away the facts of his cruel and even savage fanaticism in 
Ireland when he was governor of Munster. He was always 
apt to b£ abruptly brutal to a man who crossed his path. 
But even his Irish career offers aspects on which we may 
dwell with pure pleasure. Nothing could be more romantic 
than those adventures, like the feats of a paladin of the 
Faerie Queen, which he encountered in the great wood 
of Lismore; while the story of how he carried off Lord 
and Lady Roche from their breakfast-table in their own 
castle of Ballyinharsh, and how he rode with them up ravines 
and round precipices in that mad flight from their retainers, 
is as rousing as any scene ever imagined by Dumas pere. 

Raleigh called himself the Shepherd of the Ocean, and 
the name fits him well, even though his flock were less 
like sheep than like a leash of hunting leopards. His 
theory was that with a pack of small and active pinnaces 
he could successfully hunt the lumbering Spanish galleons 
without their being able to hit back. He was, in contra- 
distinction to many preceding English admirals, a cautious 
fighter at sea, and he says, in a striking passage of the 
History of the World, written towards the end of his career, 
" to clap ships together without any consideration belongs 
rather to a madman than to a man of war." He must 
have taken the keenest interest in the gigantic failure of 
the Felicissima Armada in 1588, but, tantalisingly enough, 
we have no record of his part in it. On the other hand, 
the two finest of his prose pamphlets, the Relation of the 
Action in Cadiz Harbour and the incomparable Report on 
the Fight in the Revenge, supply us with ample materials 
for forming an idea of his value as a naval strategist. 
Raleigh's earliest biographer, Oldys the antiquary, speaks 
of him as " raising a grove of laurels out of the sea," and 
it is certainly upon that element that he reaches his 
highest effect of prominence. It was at sea that he could 



24 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



give fullest scope to his hatred of the tyrannous prosperity 
of Spain. He had to be at once a gamekeeper and a 
poacher; he had to protect the legitimate interests of 
English shipping against privateers and pirates, while he 
was persuaded to be, or felt himself called upon to become, 
no little of a pirate himself. He was a passionate advocate 
of the freedom of the seas, and those who look upon 
Raleigh as a mere hot-brained enthusiast should read his 
little book called Observations on Trade and Commerce, 
written in the Tower, and see what sensible views he had 
about the causes of the depression of trade. These sage 
opinions did not check him, or his fleets of hunting- 
pinnaces, from lying in wait for the heavy wallowing 
plate-ships, laden with Indian carpets and rubies and 
sandalwood and ebony, which came swinging up to the 
equator from Ceylon or Malabar. The " freedom of the 
seas' 1 was for Raleigh's ship, the Roebuck; it was by no 
means for the Madre de Dios. We find these moral 
inconsistencies in the mind of the best of adventurers. 

A sketch of Raleigh's character would be imperfect 
indeed if it contained no word concerning his genius as a 
coloniser. One of his main determinations, early in life, 
was " to discover and conquer unknown lands, and take 
possession of them in the Queen's name." We celebrate 
in Sir Walter Raleigh one of the most intelligent and 
imaginative of the founders of our colonial empire. The 
English merchantmen before his time had been satisfied 
with the determination to grasp the wealth of the New 
World as it came home to Spain; it had not occurred to 
them to compete with the great rival at the fountain-head 
of riches. Even men like Drake and Frobisher had been 
content with a policy of forbidding Spain, as the poet 
Wither said, " to check our ships from sailing where they 
please." South America was already mainly in Spanish 
hands, but North America was still open to invasion. It 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 25 



was Raleigh's half-brother, Sir Humphrey Gilbert, who 
first thought of planting an English settlement in what 
is now the United States, in 1578. But Gilbert had " no 
luck at sea," as Queen Elizabeth observed, and it was 
Raleigh who, in 1584, took up the scheme of colonisation. 
He did not drop it until the death of Elizabeth, when, 
under the east wind of the new regime, the blossom of his 
colonial enterprises flagged. 

The motion for the ceremony of to-day originated with 
the authorities of an important American city, which 
proudly bears the name of our adventurer. The earliest 
settlement in what are now the United States was made 
at Roanoke, in Virginia, on a day which must always be 
prominent in the annals of civilisation, August 17th, 1585. 
But this colony lasted only ten months, and it was not 
until nearly two years later that the fourth expedition 
which Raleigh sent out succeeded in maintaining a perilous 
foothold in the new country. This was the little trembling 
taper to which his own name was given, the twinkling 
spark which is now the flourishing city of Raleigh in 
North Carolina. We may well marvel at the pertinacity 
with which Sir Walter persisted, in the face of innumerable 
difficulties, in sending out one colonising fleet after another, 
although, contrary to common legelid, he himself never 
set foot in North America. It was fortunate that at this 
period of his career he was wealthy] for the attempts to 
plant settlements in the vast regidp which he named 
Virginia cost him more than £40,0(10. We note at all 
turns of his fortune his extraordinary! tenacity of purpose, 
which he illustrated, as though by a imtto, in the verses he 
addressed to a comrade towards the end of his imprisonment 
in the Tower : — 




26 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



So we may think of him in his prime, as he stood on the 
Hoe of Plymouth twenty years before, a gallant figure of 
a man, bedizened with precious stones, velvets, and em- 
broidered damasks, shouting his commands to his captains 
in a strong Devonshire accent. We think of him resolutely 
gazing westward always, with the light of the sea in his 
eyes. 

We come to the final scene which we are here to-day to 
commemorate. Little honour to the rulers of England in 
1618 redounds from it, and yet we may feel that it completed 
and even redeemed from decay the character of Raleigh. 
This tragedy, which was almost a murder, was needed to 
round off the accomplishment of so strange and frantic a 
career of romantic violence, and to stamp it with meaning. 
If Raleigh had been thrown from his horse or had died 
of the ague in his bed. we should have been depressed by 
the squalid circumstances, we should have been less con- 
scious than we are now of his unbroken magnanimity. 
His failures and his excesses had made him unpopular 
throughout England, and he was both proud and peevish 
in his recognition of the fact. He declared that he was 
"nothing indebted" to the world, and again that " the 
common people are evil judges of honest things/' But the 
thirteen years of his imprisonment caused a reaction. 
People forgot how troublesome he had been and only 
recollected his magnficence. They remembered nothing 
but that he had spent his whole energy and fortune in 
resisting the brutality and avarice of the Spaniard. 

Then came the disgraceful scene of his cross-examination 
at Westminster, and the condemnation by his venal judges 
at the order of a paltr/ king. It became known, or shrewdly 
guessed, that Spain had sent to James I. a hectoring 
alternative that Raleigh must be executed in London or 
sent alive for a like purpose to Madrid. The trial was 
a cowardly and igiominious submission of the English 



The Shepherd of the Ocean 27 



Government to the insolence of England's hereditary 
enemy. Raleigh seemed for the moment to have failed 
completely, yet it was really like the act of Samson, who 
slew more men at his death than in all his life. Samuel 
Pepys, who had some fine intuitions at a time when the 
national moral was very low, spoke of Raleigh as being 
" given over, as a sacrifice/ ' to our enemies. This has 
been, in truth, the secret of his unfailing romantic popu- 
larity, and it is the reason of the emotion which has called 
us together here three hundred years after his death upon 
the scaffold. 



THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE 



THE SONGS OF SHAKESPEARE 



Among the " co-supremes and stars of love " which form 
the constellated glory of our greatest poet there is one small 
splendour which we are apt to overlook in our general 
survey. But, if we isolate it from other considerations, 
it is surely no small thing that Shakespeare created and 
introduced into our literature the Dramatic Song. If with 
statistical finger we turn the pages of all his plays, we shall 
discover, not perhaps without surprise, that these contain 
not fewer than fifty strains of lyrical measure. Some of 
the fifty, to be sure, are mere star-dust, but others include 
some of the very jewels of our tongue. They range in form 
from the sophisticated quatorzains of The Two Gentlemen of 
Verona (where, however, comes ' 5 Who is Silvia?'') to 
the reckless snatches of melody in Harnltt. But all have a 
character which is Shakespearean, and this regardless of 
the question so often raised, and so incapable of reply, as 
to whether some of the wilder ones are Shakespeare's com- 
position or no. Whoever originally may have written such 
scraps as " They bore him bare-faced on the bier" and 
" Come o'er the bourne, Bessy, to me," the spirit of Shake- 
speare now pervades and possesses them. 

Our poet was a prodigious innovator in this as in so many 
other matters. Of course, the idea and practice of musical 
interludes in plays was not quite novel. In Shakespeare's 
early youth that remarkable artist in language, John Lyly, 
had presented songs in several of his plays, and these were 
notable for what his contemporary, Henry Upchear, called 
" their labouring beauty." We may notice that Lyly's 

31 



32 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



songs were not printed till long after Shakespeare's death, 
but doubtless he had listened to them. Peele and Greene 
had brilliant lyrical gifts, but they did not exercise them 
in their dramas, nor did Lodge, whose novel of Rosalynde 
(1590) contains the only two precedent songs which we 
could willingly add to Shakespeare's juvenile repertory. 
But while I think it would be rash to deny that the lyrics 
of Lodge and Lyly had their direct influence on the style of 
Shakespeare, neither of those admirable precursors con- 
ceived the possibility of making the Song an integral part 
of the development of the drama. This was Shakespeare's 
invention, and he applied it with a technical adroitness 
which had never been dreamed of before and was never 
rivalled after. 

This was not apprehended by the early critics of our divine 
poet, and has never yet, perhaps, received all the attention 
it deserves. We may find ourselves bewildered if we glance 
at what the eighteenth-century commentators said, for 
instance, about the songs in Twelfth Night. They called 
the adorable rhapsodies of the Clown " absurd " and 
" unintelligible" ;• " O Mistress mine" was in their ears 
" meaningless" ; "When that I was" appeared to them 
" degraded buffoonery." They did not perceive the close 
and indispensable connection between the Clown's song and 
the action of the piece, although the poet had been careful 
to point out that it was a moral song " dulcet in contagion," 
and too good, except for sarcasm, to be wasted on Sir 
Andrew and Sir Toby. The critics neglected to note what 
the Duke says about " Come away, come away, Death," 
and they prattled in their blindness as to whether this 
must not really have been sung by Viola, all the while 
insensible to the poignant dramatic value of it as warbled 
by the ironic Clown in the presence of the blinded pair. 
But indeed the whole of Twelfth Night is burdened with 
melody; behind every garden-door a lute is tinkling, and 



The Songs of Shakespeare 33 



at each change of scene some unseen hand is overheard 
touching a harp-string. The lovely, infatuated lyrics arrive, 
dramatically, to relieve this musical tension at its height. 

Rather different, and perhaps still more subtle, is the case 
of A Winter's Tale, where the musical obsession is less 
prominent, and where the songs are all delivered from the 
fantastic lips of Autolycus. Here again the old critics were 
very wonderful. Dr. Burney puts " When daffodils begin 
to peer" and " Lawn as white as driven snow" into one 
bag, and flings it upon the dust-heap, as " two nonsensical 
songs" sung by " a pickpocket." Dr. Warburton blushed 
to think that such " nonsense" could be foisted on Shake- 
speare's text. Strange that those learned men were unable 
to see, not merely that the rogue-songs are intensely human 
and pointedly Shakespearean, but that they are an integral 
part of the drama. They complete the revelation of the 
complex temperament of Autolycus, with his passion for 
flowers and millinery, his hysterical balancing between 
laughter and tears, his impish mendacity, his sudden senti- 
mentality, like the Clown's 

" Not a friend, not a friend greet 
My poor corpse, where my bones shall be thrown ! ■ ' 

It is in these subtle lyrical amalgams of humour and tender- 
ness that the firm hand of the creator of character reveals 
itself. 

But it is in The Tempest that Shakespeare's supremacy 
as a writer of songs is most brilliantly developed. Here 
are seven or eight lyrics, and among them are some of the 
loveliest things that any man has written. What was ever 
composed more liquid, more elastic, more delicately fairy- 
like than Ariel's First Song? 

" Come unto these yellow sands, 
And then take hands : 
Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd, — 
The wild waves whist." 

D 



34 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



That is, not " kissed the wild waves," as ingenious punctu- 
ators pretend, but, parenthetically, " kissed one another, — 
the wild waves being silent the while." Even fairies do not 
kiss waves, than which no embrace could be conceived less 
rewarding. Has any one remarked the echo of Marlowe 
here, from Hero and Leandcr, 

i 

" when all is whist and still, 
Save that the sea playing on yellow sand 
Sends forth a rattling murmur to the land ! M 

But Marlowe, with all his gifts, could never have written 
the lyrical parts of The Tempest. This song is in emotional 
sympathy with Ferdinand, and in the truest sense dramatic, 
not a piece of pretty verse foisted in to add to the enter- 
tainment. 

Ariel's Second Song has been compared with Webster's 
" Call for the robin redbreast in The White Devil, but 
solemn as Webster's dirge is, it tolls, it does not sing to us. 
Shakespeare's " ditty," as Ferdinand calls it, is like a breath 
of the west wind over an aeolian harp. Where, in any 
language, has ease of metre triumphed more adorably than 
in Ariel' s Fourth Song, — ' ' Where the bee sucks 9 1 ? Dowden 
saw in Ariel the imaginative genius of English poetry, 
recently delivered from Sycorax. If we glance at Dryden's 
recension of The Tempest we may be inclined to think that 
the ' 1 wicked dam" soon won back her mastery. With 
all respect to Dryden, what are we to think of his discretion 
in eking out Shakespeare's insufficiencies with such staves 
as this : — 

" Upon the floods we'll sing and play 
And celebrate a halcyon day ; 
Great Nephew Aeolus make no noise, 
Muzzle your roaring boys/' 

and so forth ? What had happened to the ear of England 
in seventy years ? 



The Songs of Shakespeare 



35 



As a matter of fact the perfection of dramatic song 
scarcely survived Shakespeare himself. The early 
Jacobeans, Heywood, Ford, and Dekker in particular, 
broke out occasionally in delicate ditties. But most play- 
wrights, like Massinger, were persistently pedestrian. The 
only man who came at all close to Shakespeare as a lyrist 
was Jehn Fletcher, whose " Lay a garland on my hearse " 
nobody could challenge if it were found printed first in a 
Shakespeare quarto. The three great songs in " Valen- 
tinian" have almost more splendour than any of Shake- 
speare's, though never quite the intimate beauty, the singing 
spontaneity of " Under the greenwood tree" or "Hark, 
hark, the lark." It has grown to be the habit of antholo- 
gists to assert Shakespeare's right to " Roses, their sharp 
spikes being gone." The mere fact of its loveliness and 
perfection gives them no authority to do so; and to my 
ear the rather stately procession of syllables is reminiscent 
of Fletcher. We shall never be certain ; and who would 
not swear that " Hear, ye ladies that are coy" was by the 
same hand that wrote " Sigh no more, ladies," if we were 
not sure of the contrary ? But the most effective test, even 
in the case of Fletcher, is to see whether the trill of song is, 
or is not, an inherent portion of the dramatic structure of 
the play. This is the hall-mark of Shakespeare, and perhaps 
of him alone. 



CATHARINE TROTTER 



CATHARINE TROTTER, 

THE PRECURSOR OF THE 
BLUESTOCKINGS 

The practically complete absence of the Woman of 
Letters from our tropical and profuse literature of the 
early and middle seventeenth century has often been 
observed with wonder. While France had her Madeleine 
de Scudery and her Mile, de Gournay and her Mere Angelique 
Arnauld, Englishwomen of the Stuart age ventured upon 
no incursions into philosophy, fiction, or theology. More 
and more eagerly, however, they read books; and as a 
consequence of reading, they began at last to write. The 
precious Margaret, Duchess of Newcastle, hob-a-nobbed 
with every Muse in her amazing divagations. But the 
earliest professional woman of letters was Aphra Behn, the 
novelist and playwright, to whose genius justice has only 
quite lately been done by Mr. Montague Summers. Mrs. 
Behn died in 1689, an d ^ seemed at first that she had left 
no heritage to her sex. - But there presently appeared a set 
of female writers, who enlivened the last years of the 
century, but who were soon eclipsed by the wits of the age 
of Anne, and who have been entirely forgotten. It is to 
the most interesting of these " transient phantoms " that 
I wish to draw attention. 

The extreme precocity of Catharine Trotter makes her 
seem to belong to the age of Dryden, but she was in reality 
younger than Addison and most of the other contemporaries 

39 



40 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



of Pope. vShe was born on August 16th, 1679, the younger 
daughter of a naval officer, Captain David Trotter, R.N. ; 
her mother's maiden name had been Sarah Ballenden, 
probably of the well-known Catholic family of that ilk. 
She " had the honour of being nearly related to the illustri- 
ous families of Maitland, Duke of Lauderdale and Drum- 
mond, Earl of Perth/ ' The Jacobite fourth Earl of Perth 
seems to have been the patron of Captain Trotter, of whom 
he wrote in 1684 that he was " an ornament to his country." 
Apparently the gallant captain was attached to Trinity 
House, where his probity and integrity earned him the 
epithet of " honest David," and where he attracted the 
notice of George, first Lord Dartmouth, when that rising 
statesman was appointed Master. Captain Trotter had 
served the Crown from his youth, " with great gallantry 
and fidelity, both by land and sea," and had been very 
successful in the Dutch wars. He had a brother who was a 
commander in the Navy. We get an impression of high 
respectability in the outer, but not outermost, circles of 
influential Scottish society. Doubtless the infancy of 
Catharine was spent in conditions of dependent prosperity. 

These conditions were not to last. When she was four 
years old Lord Dartmouth started on the famous expedition 
to demolish Tangier, and he took Captain Trotter with him 
as his commodore. In this affair, as before, the captain 
distinguished himself by his ability, and instead of returning 
to London after Tangier he was recommended to King 
Charles II. as the proper person to convoy the fleet of the 
Turkey Company to its destination. Apparently it was 
understood that this would be the final reward of his services 
and that he was to " make his fortune " out of the Turks. 
Unhappily, after convoying his charge safely to Scanderoon, 
he fell sick of the plague that was raging there, and died, 
in the course of January 1684, i n company with all the 
other officers of his ship. Every misfortune now ensued; 



Catharine Trotter 



4 1 



the purser, who was thus left to his own devices, helped 
himself to the money destined for the expenses of the voy- 
age, while, to crown all, the London goldsmith in whose 
hands the captain had left his private fortune took this 
occasion to go bankrupt. The King, in these melancholy 
circumstances, granted an Admiralty pension to the widow, 
but when he died early in the following year this was no 
longer paid, and the unfortunate ladies of the Trotter family 
might well murmur : — 

" One mischief brings another on his neck, 
As mighty billows tumble in the seas." 

From the beginning of her fifth year, then, Catharine 
experienced the precarious lot of those who depend for a 
livelihood on the charity of more or less distant relatives. 
We dimly see a presentable mother piteously gathering 
up such crumbs as fell from the tables of the illustrious 
famiHes with whom she was remotely connected. But 
the Duke of Lauderdale himself was now dead, and the 
Earl of Perth had passed the zenith of his power. No doubt 
in the seventeenth century the protection of poor relations 
was carried on more systematically than it is to-day, and 
certainly Mrs. Trotter contrived to live and to bring up her 
two daughters genteelly. The first years were the worst ; 
the accession of William III. brought back to England and 
to favour Gilbert Burnet, who became Bishop of Salisbury 
in 1688, when Catharine was nine years old. Mrs. Trotter 
found a patron and perhaps an employer in the Bishop, 
and when Queen Anne came to the throne her little pension 
was renewed. 

There is frequent reference to money in Catharine Trotter's 
writings, and the lack of it was the rock upon which her gifts 
were finally wrecked. With a competency she might have 
achieved a much more prominent place in English literature 
than she could ever afford to reach. She offers a curious 



42 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



instance of the depressing effect of poverty, and we get the 
impression that she was never, during her long and virtuous 
career, lifted above the carking anxiety which deadens the 
imagination. As a child, however, she seems to have 
awakened hopes of a high order. She was a prodigy, and 
while little more than an infant she displayed an illumination 
in literature which was looked upon, in that age of female 
darkness, as quite a portent. She taught herself French, 
" by her own application without any instructor," but was 
obliged to accept some assistance in acquiring Latin and 
logic. The last-mentioned subject became her particular 
delight, and at a very tender age she drew up " an abstract " 
of that science " for her own use." Thus she prepared 
for her future communion with Locke and with Leibnitz. 
When she was very small, in spite of frequent conferences 
with learned members of the Church of England, she became 
persuaded of the truth of Catholicism and joined the 
Roman communion. We may conjecture that this coin- 
cided with the conversion of her kinsman, Lord Chancellor 
Perth, but as events turned out it cannot but have added to 
the sorrows of that much-tried woman, her mother. (It 
should be stated that Catharine resumed the Anglican faith 
when she was twenty-eight years of age.) 

She was in her tenth year when the unhappy reign of 
James II. came to a close. Mrs. Trotter's connections were 
now in a poor plight. The new Earl of Lauderdale was in 
great distress for money ; Lord Dartmouth, abandoned by 
the King in his flight, was thrown into the Tower, where he 
died on October 25 th, 1691, in which year the estates of 
the Earl of Perth were sequestered and he himself hunted 
out of the country. Ruin simultaneously fell on all the 
fine friends of our infant prodigy, and we can but guess how 
it affected her. Yet there were plenty of other Jacobites 
left in London, and Catharine's first public appearance 
shows that she cultivated their friendship. She published 



Catharine Trotter 



43 



in 1693 a copy of verses addressed to Mr. Bevil Higgons 
on the occasion of his recovery from the smallpox ; she was 
then fourteen years of age. Higgons was a young man of 
twenty-three, who had lately returned from the exiled court 
in France, where he had distinguished himself by his agree- 
able manners, and who had just made a name for himself by 
poems addressed to Dry den and by a prologue to Congreve' s 
Old Batchelor. He was afterwards to become famous for 
a little while as a political historian. Catharine Trotter's 
verses are bad, but she addresses Higgons as ''lovely 
youth/' and claims his gratitude for her tribute in terms 
which are almost boisterous. This poem was not only her 
introduction to the public, but, through Bevil Higgons, 
was probably the channel of her acquaintance with Congreve 
and Dryden. 

Throughout her life she was fond of writing letters to 
celebrated people; she now certainly wrote to Congreve 
and doubtless to Dryden. A freedom in correspondence ran 
in the family. Her poor mother is revealed to us as always 
"renewing her application " to somebody or other. We 
next find the youthful poet in relation with the Earl of 
Dorset, from whom she must have concealed her Jacobite 
propensities. Dorset was the great public patron of poetry 
under William III., and Catharine Trotter, aged sixteen, 
having composed a tragedy, appealed to him for support. It 
was very graciously granted, and Agnes de Castro, in five 
acts and in blank verse, " written by a young lady," was 
produced at the Theatre Royal in 1695, under the " protec- 
tion " of Charles Earl of Dorset and Middlesex, Lord 
Chamberlain of His Majesty's Household. The event 
caused a considerable commotion. No woman had written 
for the English stage since the death of Mrs. Behn, and 
curiosity was much excited. Mrs. Verbruggen, that en- 
chanting actress, but in male attire, recited a clever, ranting 
epilogue at the close of the performance, in which she said : — 



44 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



" 'tis whispered here 
Our Poetess is virtuous, young and fair," 

but the secret was an open one. Wycherley, who con- 
tributed verses, knew all about it, and so did Mrs. Manley, 
while Powell and Colley Cibber were among the actors. We 
may be sure that little Mistress Trotter's surprising talents 
were the subjects of much discussion at Will's Coffee House, 
and that the question of securing her for the rival theatre 
was anxiously debated at Lincoln's Inn Fields. Her success 
in Agnes de Castro was the principal asset which Drury 
Lane had to set that season against Congreve's splendid 
adventure with Love for Love, 

Agnes de Castro is an immature production, and shows 
a juvenile insensibility to plagiarism, since the subject and 
treatment are borrowed implicitly from a French novel by 
Mile, de Brillac, published in Paris and London a few years 
before. 1 The conception of court life at Coimbra in the 
fourteenth century is that of this French lady, and is 
innocent of Portuguese local colour. But, as the dramatic 
work of a girl of sixteen, the play is rather extraordinary 
for nimble movement and adroit theatrical arrangements. 
It is evident that Catharine Trotter was well versed in 
the stage traditions of her own day, and we may wonder 
how a highly respectable girl of sixteen found her oppor- 
tunity. The English playhouse under William III. was 
no place for a very young lady, even if she wore a mask. 
There is a good deal of meritorious character-drawing in 
Agnes de Castro. The conception of a benevolent and 
tenderly forgiving Princess is well contrasted with the 
fierce purity of Agnes and the infatuation of the Prince. 
Towards the close of the first act there is a capital scene 
of exquisite confusion between this generous and distracted 

1 Around the story of Agnes de Castro there gathered a whole 
literature of fiction, which Mr. Montague Summers has investigated 
in his Works of Aphra Behn, Vol. V. pp. 21 1-2 12. 



Catharine Trotter 



45 



trio. The opening of the third act, between Elvira and 
her brother Alvaro, is not at all young-ladyish, and has 
some strong turns of feeling. The end of the play, with 
the stabbing of the Princess and the accusation of Agnes 
by Elvira, is puerile, but was doubtless welcome to a 
sentimental audience. It is a bad play, but not at all 
an unpromising one. 

Early in 1696 Agnes de Castro, still anonymous, was 
published as a book, and for the next five or six years 
we find Catharine Trotter habitually occupied in writing 
for the stage. Without question she did so professionally, 
though in what way dramatists at the close of the seven- 
teenth century lived by their pens is difficult to conjecture. 
A very rare play, The Female Wits; or, the Triumvirate 
of Poets , the authorship of which has hitherto defied con- 
jecture, was acted at Drury Lane after Catharine Trotter 
had been tempted across to Lincoln's Inn Fields, and is 
evidently inspired by the intense jealousy which smouldered 
between the two great houses. The success of Miss Trotter 
incited two older ladies to compete with her; these were 
Mrs. Delariviere Manley, who was a discarded favourite 
of Barbara Villiers, and fat Mrs. Mary Pix, the stage- 
struck consort of a tailor. These rather ridiculous women 
professed themselves followers of Catharine, and they 
produced plays of their own not without some success. 
With her they formed the trio of Female Wits who were 
mocked in the lively but, on the whole, rather disappoint- 
ing play I have just mentioned, in the course of which it 
is spitefully remarked of Calista — who is Miss Trotter — 
that she has " made no small struggle in the world to 
get into print/ ' and is " now in such a state of wedlock 
to pen and ink that it will be very difficult " for her " to 
get out of it." 

In acting The Female Wits Mrs. Temple, who had played 
the Princess in Agnes de Castro, took the part of Calista, 



46 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



and doubtless, in the coarse fashion of those days, made 
up exactly like poor Catharine Trotter, who was described 
as " a Lady who pretends to the learned Languages, and 
assumes to herself the name of a Critic." This was a 
character, however, which she would not have protested 
against with much vigour, for she had now quite definitely 
taken up the position of a reformer and a pioneer. She 
posed as the champion of women's intellectual rights, and 
she was accepted as representing in active literary work 
the movement which Mary Astell had recently foreshadowed 
in her remarkable Serious Proposal to Ladies of 1694. 
We turn again to The Female H its, and we find Marsilia 
(Mrs. Manley) describing Calista to Mrs. Wellfed (Mrs. Pix) as 
" the vainest, proudest, senseless Thing ! She pretends to 
grammar ! writes in mood and figure ! does everything 
methodically ! " Yet when Calista appears on the stage, 
Mrs. Manley rushes across to fling her arms around her 
and to murmur : " O charmingest Nymph of all Apollo's 
Train, let me embrace thee ! " Later on Calista says to 
Mrs. Pix, the fat tailoress, " I cannot but remind you, 
Madam ... I read Aristotle in his own language' ' ; and 
of a certain tirade in a play of Ben Jonson she insists : 
M I know it so well, as to have turn'd it into Latin." Mrs. 
Pix admits her own ignorance of all these things; she 
" can go no further than the eight parts of speech.' ' This 
brings down upon her an icy reproof from Calista : " Then 
I cannot but take the Freedom to say . . . you impose 
upon the Town." We get the impression of a preciseness 
of manner and purpose which must have given Catharine 
a certain air of priggishness, not entirely unbecoming, 
perhaps, but very strange in that loose theatre of 
William III. 

Accordingly, in her next appearance, we find her com- 
plaining to the Princess (afterwards Queen Anne) that 
she has become ' the mark of ill Nature" through recom- 



Catharine Trotter 



47 



mending herself "by what the other Sex think their 
peculiar Prerogative ' ' — that is, intellectual distinction. 
Catharine Trotter was still only nineteen years of age 
when she produced her tragedy of Fatal Friendship, the 
published copy of which (1698) is all begarlanded with 
evidences of her high moral purpose in the shape of a 
succession of " applausive copies " of verses. In these we 
are told that she had " checked the rage of reigning vice 
that had debauched the stage." This was an allusion to 
the great controversy then just raised by Jeremy Collier in 
his famous Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness 
of the Stage, in which all the dramatists of the day were 
violently attacked for their indecency. Catharine Trotter 
has the courage to side with Collier, and the tact to do 
so without quarrelling with her male colleagues. She 
takes the side of the decent women. 

" You as your Sex's champion art come forth 
To fight their quarrel and assert their worth/' 

one of her admirers exclaims, and another adds : — 

" You stand the first of stage-reformers too." 

The young poetess aimed at reconciling the stage with 
virtue and at vindicating the right of woman to assume 
" the tragic laurel." 

This was the most brilliant moment in the public career 
of our bluestocking. Fatal Friendship enjoyed a success 
which Catharine Trotter was not to taste again, and of all 
her plays it is the only one which has ever been reprinted. 
It is very long and extremely sentimental, and written 
in rather prosy blank verse. Contemporaries said that it 
placed Miss Trotter in the forefront of British drama, in 
company with Congreve and Granville " the polite," who had 
written a She-Gallants f which was everything that Miss 
Trotter did not wish her plays to be. Fatal Friendship 



48 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



has an ingenious plot, in which the question of money 
takes a prominence very unusual in tragedy. Almost 
every character in the piece is in reduced circumstances. 
Felicia, sister to Belgard (who is too poor to maintain her), 
is wooed by the wealthy Roquelaure, although she is 
secretly married to Gramont, who is also too poor to 
support a wife. Belgard, afraid that Gramont will make 
love to Felicia (that is, to his own secret wife), persuades 
him — in order that his best friend, Castalio, may be released 
from a debtor's prison — bigamously to marry Lamira, a 
wealthy widow. But Castalio is in love with Lamira, and 
is driven to frenzy by Gramont' s illegal marriage. It all 
depends upon income in a manner comically untragical. 
The quarrel between the friends in the fifth act is an 
effective piece of stage-craft, but the action is spoiled by 
a ridiculous general butchery at the close of all. However, 
the audience was charmed, and even " the stubbornest 
could scarce deny their Tears." 

Fatal Friendship was played at the Lincoln's Inn 
Theatre, and no doubt it was Congreve who brought Miss 
Trotter over from Drury Lane. His warm friendship for 
her had unquestionably a great deal to do with her success 
and with the jealousy of her rivals. A letter exists in which 
the great dramatist acknowledges, in 1697, the congratula- 
tions of his young admirer, and it breathes an eager 
cordiality. Congreve requested Betterton to present him 
to Catharine Trotter, and his partiality for her company 
is mentioned by several writers. The spiteful author of 
The Female Wits insinuates that Congreve made the 
looking-over of Catharine's scenes " his pretence for daily 
visits." Another satirist, in 1698, describes Congreve sitting 
very gravely with his hat over his eyes, " together with the 
two she-things called Poetesses which write for his house," 
half-hidden from the public in a little side-box. Farquhar, 
too, seeing the celebrated writer of Fatal Friendship 



Catharine Trotter 



49 



in the theatre on the third night of the performance of 
his Love and a Bottle, had " his passions wrought so 
high" by a sight of the beautiful author that he wrote 
her a letter in which he called her " one of the fairest of 
the sex, and the best judge." If Catharine Trotter, as 
the cynosure of delicacy, at the age of nineteen, sat through 
Love and a Bottle without a blush, even her standard of 
decency was not very exacting. But in all this rough, 
coarse world of wit her reputation never suffered a rebuff. 

Encouraged by so much public and private attention, 
our young dramatist continued to work with energy and 
conscientiousness. But her efforts were forestalled by an 
event, or rather a condition of the national temper, of 
which too little notice has been taken by literary historians. 
The attacks on the stage for its indecency and blasphemy 
had been flippantly met by the theatrical agents, but they 
had sunk deeply into the conscience of the people. There 
followed with alarming abruptness a general public repul- 
sion against the playhouses, and to this, early in 1699, a 
roughly worded Royal Proclamation gave voice. During 
the whole of that year the stage was almost in abeyance, 
and even Congreve, with The Way of the World, was 
unable to woo his audience back to Lincoln's Inn. During 
this time of depression Catharine Trotter composed at least 
two tragedies, which she was unable to get performed, 
while the retirement of Congreve in a paroxysm of annoy- 
ance must have been a very serious disadvantage to her. 

On May 1st, 1700, Dryden died, and with him a dramatic 
age passed away. What Miss Trotter's exact relations 
with the great poet had been is uncertain; she not only 
celebrated his death in a long elegy, in which she speaks 
on behalf of the Muses, but wrote another and more 
important poem, in which she gives very sound advice 
to the poetical beginner, who is to take Dryden as a 
model, and to be particularly careful to disdain Settle, 

E 



50 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Durfey, and Blackmore, typical poetasters of the period. 
She recommends social satire to the playwright : — 

" Let the nice well-bred beau himself perceive 
The most accomplish'd, useless thing alive ; 
Expose the bottle-sparks that range the town, — 
Shaming themselves with follies not their own, — 
But chief these foes to virgin innocence, 
Who, while they make to honour vain pretence, 
With all that's base and impious can dispense." 

Honour to those who aim high and execute boldly ! 

" If Shakespeare's spirit, with transporting fire, 
The animated scene throughout inspire ; 
If in the piercing wit of Vanbrugh drest, 
Each sees his darling folly made a jest; 
If Garth's and Dryden's genius, through each line, 
In artful praise and well-turn'd satire shine, — 
To us ascribe, the immortal sacred flame." 

In this dead period of the stage Catharine Trotter found 
a warm friend and doubtless an efficient patron in a Lady 
Piers, of whom we should be glad to know more. Sir 
George Piers, the husband of this lady, was an officer of 
rank under the Duke of Marlborough, later to become 
useful to Catharine Trotter. Meanwhile the latter returned 
to the Theatre Royal in Drury Lane, where, in 1701, 
under the patronage of Lord Halifax — Pope's << Bufo M — 
she produced her third tragedy, The Unhappy Penitent. 
The dedication of this play to Halifax is a long and 
interesting essay on the poetry of the age. The author 
passes Dryden, Otway, Congreve, and Lee under examina- 
tion, and finds technical blemishes in them all : — 

" The inimitable Shakespeare seems alone secure on 
every side from an attack. I speak not here of faults 
against the rules of poetry, but against the natural Genius. 
He had all the images of nature present to him, studied 
her thoroughly, and boldly copied all her various features, 
for though he has chiefly exerted himself on the more 



Catharine Trotter 



5 1 



masculine passions, 'tis as the choice of his judgment, 
not the restraint of his genius, and he has given us as a 
proof he could be every way equally admirable/' 

Lady Piers wrote the prologue to The Unhappy Peni- 
tent in verses better turned than might have been 
expected. She did not stint praise to her young friend, 
whom she compares to the rising sun : — 

" Like him, bright Maid, Thy great perfections shine, 
As awful, as resplendent, as divine ! . . . 
Minerva and Diana guard your soul ! " 

The Unhappy Penitent is not a pleasing performance : 
it is amorous and violent, but yet dull. Catharine's theory 
was better than her practice. Nevertheless, it seems to 
have been successful, for the author some time afterwards, 
speaking of the town's former discouragement of her dramas, 
remarks that " the taste is mended." Later in 1701 she 
brought out at Drury Lane her only comedy, Love at a 
Loss, dedicated in most enthusiastic terms to Lady Piers, 
to whom " I owe the greatest Blessing of my Fate," the 
privilege of a share in her friendship. Love at a Loss 
was made up of the comic scenes introduced into an old 
tragedy which the author had failed to get acted. This 
is not a fortunate method *of construction, and the town 
showed no favour to Love at a Loss. The first and only 
public section of Catharine Trotter's career was now over, 
and she withdrew, a wayworn veteran at the age of 
twenty-two, to more elevated studies. 

When Love at a Loss was published the author had 
already left town, and after a visit to Lady Piers in Kent 
she now settled at Salisbury, at the house of a physician, 
Dr. Inglis, who had married her only sister. Her growing 
intimacy with the family of Bishop Burnet may have had 
something to do with her determination to make this city 



52 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



her home. She formed a very enthusiastic friendship with 
the Bishop's second lady, who was an active theologian 
and a very intelligent woman. Our poetess was fascinated 
by Mrs. Burnet. " I have not met," she writes in 1701, 
" such perfection in any of our sex." She now visited in 
the best Wiltshire society. When the famous singer, John 
Abell, was in Salisbury, he gave a concert at the palace, 
and Catharine Trotter was so enchanted that she rode out 
after him six miles to Tisbury to hear him sing again at 
Lord Arundell of Wardour's house. She had a great 
appreciation of the Bishop's " volatile activity." It is 
now that the name of Locke first occurs in her correspond- 
ence, and we gather that she came into some personal 
contact with him through a member of the Bishop's family 
— George Burnet of Kemney, in Aberdeenshire — probably 
a cousin, with whom she now cultivated an ardent intel- 
lectual friendship. He left England on a mission which 
occupied him from the middle of 1701 until 1708, and 
this absence, as we may suspect, alone prevented their 
acquaintance from ripening into a warmer feeling. The 
romance and tragedy of Catharine Trotter's life gather, 
it is plain, around this George Burnet, who was a man 
of brilliant accomplishments and interested, like herself, 
in philosophical studies. 

These, it would appear, Catharine Trotter had never 
abandoned, but she applied herself to them closely at 
Salisbury, where she made some superior acquaintances. 
One of these was John Norris of Bemerton, whose Theory 
of an Ideal and Intelligible World had just made some 
sensation. By the intermediary of George Burnet she 
came in touch with some of the leading French writers 
of the moment, such as Malebranche and Madame Dacier. 
There is a French poet, unnamed, who understands English, 
but he is gone to Rome before he can be made to read 
The Fatal Friendship. Meanwhile, Catharine Trotter's 



Catharine Trotter 53 



obsession with the ideas of Locke was giving some anxiety 
to her friends. That philosopher had published his famous 
Essay on the Human Understanding in 1690, and it had 
taken several years for the opposition to his views, and 
in particular to his theological toleration, to take effect. 
But in 1697 there were made a number of almost simul- 
taneous attacks on Locke's position. The circle at Salisbury 
was involved in them, for one of these was written by 
Norris of Bemerton, and another is attributed to a member 
of the Burnet family. Catharine Trotter, who had studied 
Locke's later works with enthusiastic approval, was scan- 
dalised by the attacks, and sat down to refute them. 
This must have been in 1701. 

Although the intellectual society of Salisbury was pro- 
minent in taking the conservative view of Locke, our 
bluestocking could not refrain from telling Mrs. Burnet 
what she had done, nor from showing her treatise to that 
friend under vows of confidence. But Mrs. Burnet, who 
was impulsive and generous, could not keep the secret; 
she spoke about it to the Bishop, and then to Norris of 
Bemerton, and finally (in June 1702) to Locke himself. 
Locke was at Oates, confined by his asthma; he was old 
and suffering, but still full of benevolence and curiosity, 
and he was graciously interested in his remarkable defender 
at Salisbury. As he could not himself travel, he sent his 
adopted son to call on Catharine Trotter, with a present 
of books; this was Peter King, still a young man, but 
already M.P. for Beer Alston, and later to become Lord 
Chancellor and the first Lord King of Ockham. George 
Burnet, writing from Paris, had been very insistent that 
Catharine should not publish her treatise, but she overruled 
his objections, and her Defence of Mr. Locke's Essay on 
the Human Understanding appeared anonymously in May 
1702. People were wonderfully polite in those days, and 
Locke himself wrote to his " protectress" a charming 



54 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



letter in which he told her that her Defence was the 
greatest honour my Essay could have procured me." 

She sent her Defence to Leibnitz, who criticised it at 
considerable length : — 1 

" J'ai lu livre de Mile. Trotter. Dans la dedicace elle 
exhorte M. Locke a donner des demonstrations de morale. 
Je crois qu'il aurait eu de la peine a y reussir. L'art de 
demontrer n'est pas son fait. Je tiens que nous nous 
appercevons sans raisonnement de ce qui est juste et 
in juste, comme nous nous appercevons sans raison de 
quelques theoremes de Geometrie; mais il est tousjours 
bon de venir a la demonstration. Justice et injustice ne 
dependent seulement de la nature humaine, mais de la 
nature de la substance intelligente en general; et Mile. 
Trotter remarque fort bien qu'elle vient de la nature de 
Dieu et n'est point arbitraire. La nature de Dieu est 
tousjours fondee en raison.' ' 

Notwithstanding all this, the commentators of Locke 
appear, without exception, to ignore the Defence, and it 
was probably never much read outside the cultivated 
Salisbury circle. 

In this year, 1702, the health of Catharine Trotter began 
to give her uneasiness, and it was for this reason that she 
left Salisbury for a while. She was once more living in 
that city, however, from May 1703 to March 1704, making 
a special study of geography. " My strength/' she writes 
to George Burnet, " is very much impaired, and God knows 
whether I shall ever retrieve it." Her thoughts turned 
again to the stage, and in the early months of 1703 she 
composed her fifth and last play, the tragedy of The 
Revolution in Sweden) " but it will not be ready for the 

1 Printed in Otto Klopp's Correspondance de Leibnitz avec 

VElectyice Sophie. Hanover, 1875. 



Catharine Trotter 



55 



stage," she says, " till next winter." Her interest in 
philosophy did not flag. She was gratified by some com- 
munications, through Burnet, with Leibnitz, and she would 
have liked to be the intermediary between Locke and 
some philosophical " gentlemen " on the Continent, prob- 
ably Malebranche and Leibnitz, in a controversy. But 
this was hopeless, and she writes (March 16th, 1704) : — 

u Mr. Locke is unwilling to engage in controversy with 
the gentlemen you mention; for, I am informed, his 
infirmities have obliged him, for some time past, to desist 
from his serious studies, and only employ himself in lighter 
things, which serve to amuse and unbend the mind." 

Locke, indeed, had but six months more to live, and 
though he retained his charming serenity of spirit he was 
well aware that the end approached. Never contentious 
or desirous of making a sensation, he was least of all, in 
his present precarious state, likely to enter into discussion 
with foreign philosophers. It does not appear that 
Catharine Trotter ever enjoyed the felicity of seeing in 
the flesh the greatest object of her homage; but he 
occupied most of her thoughts. She was rendered highly 
indignant by the efforts made by the reactionaries at 
Oxford and elsewhere to discourage the writings of Locke 
and to throw suspicion on their influence. She read over 
and over again his philosophical, educational, and religious 
treatises, and ever found them more completely to her 
taste. If she had enjoyed the power to do so she would 
have proclaimed the wisdom and majesty of Locke from 
every housetop, and she envied Lady Masham her free 
and constant intercourse with so beautiful a mind. Catharine 
Trotter watched, but from a distance, the extinction of a 
life thus honoured, which came to a peaceful end at Oates 
on October 28th, 1704. The following passage does not 



56 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



appear — or I am much mistaken — to have attracted the 
attention of Locke's biographers : — 

" I was very sensibly touched with the news of Mr. 
Locke's death. All^the particulars I hear of it are that 
he retained his perfect senses to the last, and spoke with 
the same composedness and indifference on affairs as usual. 
His discourse was much on the different views a dying 
man has of worldly things; and that nothing gives him 
any satisfaction, but the reflection of what good he has 
done in his life. Lady Masham went to his chamber to 
speak to him on some business ; when he had answered in 
the same manner he was accustomed to speak, he desired 
her to leave the room, and, immediately after she was 
gone, turned about and died." 

She records that, after the death of Locke, Lady Masham 
communicated with Leibnitz, and Catharine is very indig- 
nant because a doubt had been suggested as to whether 
the writer's thoughts and expressions were her own. This 
was calculated to infuriate Catharine Trotter, who outpours 
in forcible terms her just indignation : — 

" Women are as capable of penetrating into the grounds 
of things, and reasoning justly, as men are, who certainly 
have no advantage of us, but in their opportunities of 
knowledge. As Lady Masham is allowed by everybody 
to have great natural endowments, she has taken pains 
to improve them; and no doubt profited much by a long 
intimate society with so extraordinary a man as Mr. Locke. 
So that I see no reason to suspect a woman of her character 
would pretend to write anything that was not entirely 
her own. I pray, be more equitable to her sex than the 
generality of your's are, who, when anything is written 
by a woman that they cannot deny their approbation to, 



Catharine Trotter 



57 



are sure to rob us of the glory of it by concluding 'tis not 
her own." 

This is the real voice of Catharine Trotter, raised to 
defend her sex, and conscious of the many intellectual 
indignities and disabilities which they suffered. 

The first draft of The Revolution in Sweden being now 
completed, she sent it to Congreve, who was living very 
quietly in lodgings in Arundell Street. He allowed some 
time to go by before, on November 2nd, 1703, he acknow- 
ledged it. His criticism, which is extremely kind, is also 
penetrating and full. " I think the design in general," 
he says, " very great and noble; the conduct of it very 
artful, if not too full of business which may run into 
length and obscurity." He warns her against having too 
much noise of fighting on the stage in her second act, and 
against offending probability in the third. The fourth act 
is confused, and in the fifth there are v too many harangues. 
Catharine Trotter has asked him to be frank, and so he 
is, but his criticism is practical and encouraging. This 
excellent letter deserves to be better known. 

To continue the history of Miss Trotter's fifth and last 
play, The Revolution in Sweden was at length brought 
out at the Queen's Theatre in the Haymarket, towards the 
close of 1704. It had every advantage which popular 
acting could give it, since the part of the hero, Count 
Arwide, was played by Betterton ; that of Constantia, the 
heroine, by Mrs. Barry ; Gustavus by Booth ; and Christina 
by Mrs. Harcourt. In spite of this galaxy of talent, the 
reception of the play was unfavourable. The Duchess of 
Marlborough " and all her beauteous family" graced the 
theatre on the first night, but the public was cold and 
inattentive. Some passages of a particularly lofty moral 
tone provoked laughter. The Revolution in Sweden, in 
fact, was shown to suffer from the ineradicable faults 



58 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



which Congreve had gently but justly suggested. It was 
very long, and very dull, and very wordy, and we could 
scarcely find a more deadly specimen of virtuous and 
didactic tragedy. Catharine was dreadfully disappointed, 
nor was she completely consoled by being styled — by no 
less a person than Sophia Charlotte, Queen of Prussia — 
" The Sappho of Scotland." She determined, however, to 
appeal to readers against auditors, and when, two years 
later, after still further revision, she published The Revo- 
lution in Sweden, she dedicated it in most grateful terms 
to the Duke of Marlborough's eldest daughter, Henrietta 
Godolphin. 

How Miss Trotter came to be favoured by the Churchills 
appears from various sources to be this. Her brother-in- 
law, Dr. Inglis, was now physician-general in the army, 
and was in personal relations with the General. When 
the victory at Blenheim (August 1704) was announced, 
Catharine Trotter wrote a poem of welcome back to 
England. It is to be supposed that a manuscript copy of 
it was shown by Inglis to the Duke, with whose permission 
it was published about a month later. The poem enjoyed 
a tremendous success, for the Duke and Duchess and Lord 
Treasurer Godolphin " and several others" all liked the 
verses and said they were better than any other which 
had been written on the subject. George Burnet, who 
saw the Duke in Germany, reported him highly pleased 
with her — " the wisest virgin I ever knew," he writes. 
She now hoped, with the Duke's protection, to recover 
her father's fortune and be no longer a burden to her 
brother-in-law. A pension of £20 from Queen Anne gave 
her mother now a shadow of independence, but Catharine 
herself was wholly disappointed at that " settlement for 
my life" which she was ardently hoping for. I think 
that, if she had secured it, George Burnet would have 
come back from Germany to marry her. Instead of that 



Catharine Trotter 



59 



he sent her learned messages from Bayle and from Leibnitz, 
who calls her " une Demoiselle fort spirituelle." 

Catharine Trotter now left London and Salisbury, and 
took up her abode at Ockham Mills, close to Ripley, in 
Surrey, as companion to an invalid, Mrfe. De Vere. She 
probably chose this place on account of the Locke con- 
nection and the friendship of Peter King, since there is 
now much in her correspondence about Damaris, Lady 
Masham, and others in that circle in which George Burnet 
himself was intimate. But great changes were imminent. 
Although her correspondence at this time is copious it 
is not always very intelligible, and it is very carelessly 
edited. Her constant interchange of letters with George 
Burnet leaves the real position between them on many 
points obscure. In 1704, when he thought that he was 
dying in Berlin, he wrote to Catharine Trotter, that he had 
left her £100 in his will, and added : " Pray God I might 
live to give you much more myself.' ' He regrets that he 
had so easily " pulled himself from her company/' and 
suggests that if she had not left London to settle in Salisbury 
he would have stayed in England. Years after they had 
parted we find him begging her to continue writing to him 
" at least once a week." She, on her part, tells him that 
he well knows that there is but one person she could ever 
think of marrying. He seems to have made her want of 
vivid religious conviction the excuse for not proposing to 
her, but it is not easy to put aside the conviction that 
it was her want of a fortune which actuated him most 
strongly. Finally, he tries to pique her by telling her 
that he " knows of parties" in the city of Hanover " who 
might bring him much honour and comfort" were he not 
afraid of losing (Catharine Trotter's) friendship." They 
write to one another with extreme formality, but that 
proves nothing. A young woman, passionately in love 
with a man whom she had just accepted as her future 



60 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



husband, was expected, in 1705, to close her letter by 
describing herself as " Sir, your very humble servant/' 

If George Burnet hinted of " parties" in Hanover, 
Catharine Trotter on her side could boast of Mr. Fenn, 
" a young clergyman of excellent character," who now 
laid an ardent siege to her heart. Embarrassed by these 
attentions, she took the bold step of placing the matter 
before Mr. Cockburn, a still younger clergyman, of even 
more excellent character. The letter in which she makes 
this ingenuous declaration as to a father confessor is one 
of the tenderest examples extant of the " Why don't you 
speak for yourself, John?" form of correspondence. Mr. 
Cockburn, one of the minor clergy of the Salisbury set, 
did speak for himself, and George Burnet having at length 
announced his own projected marriage with a lady of old 
acquaintance, Catharine Trotter hesitated no longer but 
accepted the hand of Mr. Cockburn. They were married 
early in 1708. Thackeray could have created an amusing 
romance out of the relations of these four poeple to one 
another, and in particular it would have been very interest- 
ing to see what he would have made of the character of 
George Burnet. 

Catharine Cockburn was now, after so eventful a life of 
emotional and intellectual experience, still a young woman, 
not far past her twenty-eighth birthday. She was to 
survive for more than forty-three years, during which 
time she was to correspond much, to write persistently, 
and to publish whenever opportunity offered. But I do 
not propose to accompany her much further on her blame- 
less career. All through her married life, which was spent 
at various places far from London, she existed almost like 
a plant in a Leyden jar. Constant genteel poverty, making 
it difficult for her to buy books and impossible to travel, 
was supported by her with dignity and patience, but it 
dwarfed her powers. Her later writings, on philosophy, 



Catharine Trotter 



on morality, on the principles of the Christian religion, are 
so dull that merely to think of them brings tears into 
one's eyes. She who had sparkled as a girl with Congreve 
and exchanged polite amenities with Locke lived on to 
see modern criticism begin with Samuel Johnson and the 
modern novel start with Samuel Richardson, but without 
observing that any change had come into the world of 
letters. Her husband, owing to his having fallen " into 
a scruple about the oath of abjuration/' lost his curacy 
and " was reduced to great difficulties in the support of 
his family." Nevertheless — a perfect gentleman at heart 
— he " always prayed for the King and Royal family by 
name." Meanwhile, to uplift his spirits in this dreadful 
condition, he is discovered engaged upon a treatise on the 
Mosaic deluge, which he could persuade no publisher to 
print. He reminds us of Dr. Primrose in The Vicar of 
Wakefield, and, like him, Mr. Cockburn probably had 
strong views on the Whistonian doctrine. 

So little mark did poor Mrs. Cockburn make on her 
younger contemporaries that she disappeared forthwith 
from literary history. Her works, especially her plays, 
have become so excessively rare as to be almost unpro- 
curable. The brief narrative of her life and her activities 
which I have taken the liberty of presenting to-day would 
be hopelessly engulfed in obscurity, and we should know 
as little of Catharine Trotter as we do of Mary Pix, and 
Delariviere Manley, and many late seventeenth-century 
authors more eminent than they, had it not been that 
in 1751, two years after her death, all her papers were 
placed in the hands of an ingenious clergyman, the Rev. 
Dr. Thomas Birch, who printed them for subscribers in 
two thick and singularly unpleasing volumes. This private 
edition was never reissued, and is now itself a rare book. 
It is the sort of book that for two hundred and fifty years 
must fatally have been destroyed as lumber whenever an 



62 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



old country mansion that contained it has been cleared 
out. 

During all that time no one, so far as I can discover, 
has evinced the smallest interest in Catharine Trotter. 
We gain an idea of the blackness of her obscurity when 
we say that even Mr. Austin Dobson appears to have 
never heard of her. The champion of Locke and Clarke, 
the correspondent of Leibnitz and Pope, the friend of 
Congreve, the patroness of Farquhar, she seems to have 
slipped between two ages and to have lost her hold on 
time. But I hope her thin little lady-like ghost, still 
hovering in a phantom-like transparence round the recog- 
nised seats of learning, will be a little comforted at last by 
the polite attention of a few of my readers. 



THE MESSAGE OF THE 
WARTONS 



1 



7 



TWO PIONEERS OF ROMAN- 
TICISM : JOSEPH AND 
THOMAS WARTON 1 

The origins of the Romantic Movement in literature 
have been examined so closely and so often that it might 
be supposed that the subject must be by this time exhausted. 
But no subject of any importance in literature is ever 
exhausted, because the products of literature grow or decay, 
burgeon or wither, as the generations of men apply their 
ever-varying organs of perception to them. I intend, with 
your permission, to present to you a familiar phase of 
the literary life of the eighteenth century from a fresh 
point of view, and in relation to two men whose surname 
warrants a peculiar emphasis of respect in the mouth of 
a Warton Lecturer. It is well, perhaps, to indicate exactly 
what it is which a lecturer proposes to himself to achieve 
during the brief hour in which you indulge him with your 
attention; it certainly makes his task the easier if he 
does so. I propose, therefore, to endeavour to divine for 
you, by scanty signs and indications, what it was in 
poetry, as it existed up to the period of their childhood, 
which was stimulating to the Wartons, and what they 
disapproved of in the verse which was fashionable and 
popular among the best readers in their day. 

There is an advantage, which I think that our critics are 

1 Delivered, as the Warton Lecture, before the British Academy, 
October 27th, 191 5. 

F 65 



/ 



66 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



apt to neglect, in analysing the character and causes of poetic 
pleasure experienced by any sincere and enthusiastic reader, 
at any epoch of history. We are far too much in the 
habit of supposing that what we — that is the most instructed 
and sensitive of us — admire now must always have been 
admired by people of a like condition. This has been one 
of the fallacies of Romantic criticism, and has led people 
as illustrious as Keats into blaming the taste of foregoing 
generations as if it were not only heretical, but despicable 
as well. Young men to-day speak of those who fifty years 
ago expatiated in admiration of Tennyson as though they 
were not merely stupid, but vulgar and almost wicked, 
neglectful of the fact that it was by persons exactly 
analogous to themselves that those portions of Tennyson 
were adored which the young repudiate to-day. Not to 
expand too largely this question of the oscillation of taste 
— which, however, demands more careful examination than 
it has hitherto received — it is always important to discover 
what was honestly admired at a given date by the most 
enthusiastic and intelligent, in other words by the most 
poetic, students of poetry. But to do this we must cul- 
tivate a little of that catholicity of heart which perceives 
technical merit wherever it has been recognised at an 
earlier date, and not merely where the current generation 
finds it. 

Joseph and Thomas Warton were the sons of an Oxford 
professor of poetry, an old Jacobite of no observable merit 
beyond that of surrounding his family with an atmosphere 
of the study of verse. The elder brother was born in 
1722, the younger in 1728. I must be forgiven if I dwell 
a little tediously on dates, for our inquiry depends upon 
the use of them. Without dates the whole point of that 
precedency of the Wartons, which I desire to bring out, 
is lost. The brothers began very early to devote them- 
selves to the study of poetry, and in spite of the six years 



The Message of the Wartons 67 



which divided them, they appear to have meditated in 
unison. Their writings bear a close resemblance to one 
another, and their merits and their failures are alike 
identical. We have to form what broken impression we 
can of their early habits. Joseph is presented to us as 
wandering in the woodlands, lost in a melancholy fit, or 
waking out of it to note with ecstasy all the effects of 
light and colour around him, the flight of birds, the flutter 
of foliage, the panorama of cloudland. He and Thomas 
were alike in their " extreme thirst after ancient things." 
They avoided, with a certain disdain, the affectation of 
vague and conventional reference to definite objects. 

Above all they read the poets who were out of fashion, 
and no doubt the library of their father, the Professor of 
Poetry, was at their disposal from a very early hour. The 
result of their studies was a remarkable one, and the 
discovery was unquestionably first made by Joseph. He 
was, so far as we can gather, the earliest person in the 
modern world of Europe to observe what vain sacrifices 
had been made by the classicists, and in particular by the 
English classicists, and as he walked enthusiastically in 
the forest he formed a determination to reconquer the 
realm of lost beauty. The moment that this instinct 
became a purpose, we may say that the great Romantic 
Movement, such as it has enlarged and dwindled down 
to our own day, took its start. The Wartons were not 
men of creative genius, and their works, whether in prose 
or verse, have not taken hold of the national memory. 
But the advance of a great army is not announced by a 
charge of field-marshals. In the present war, the advance 
of the enemy upon open cities has generally been announced 
by two or three patrols on bicycles, who are the heralds 
of the body. Joseph and Thomas Warton were the 
bicyclist-scouts who prophesied of an advance which was 
nearly fifty years delayed. 



68 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



The general history of English literature in the eighteenth 
century offers us little opportunity for realising what the 
environment could be of two such lads as the Wartons, 
with their enthusiasm, their independence, and their revo- 
lutionary instinct. But I will take the year 1750, which 
is the year of Rousseau's first Discours and therefore the 
definite starting-point of European Romanticism. You 
will perhaps find it convenient to compare the situation 
of the Wartons with what is the situation to-day of some 
very modern or revolutionary young poet. In 1750, then, 
Joseph was twenty-eight years of age and Thomas twenty- 
two. Pope had died six years before, and this was equiva- 
lent to the death of Swinburne in the experience of our 
young man of to-day. Addison's death was as distant as 
is from us that of Matthew Arnold; and Thomson, who 
had been dead two years, had left The Castle of Indolence 
as an equivalent to Mr. Hardy's Dynasts. All the 
leading writers of the age of Anne — except Young, who 
hardly belonged to it — were dead, but the Wartons were 
divided from them only as we are from those of the age 
of Victoria. I have said that Pope was not more distant 
from them than Swinburne is from us, but really a more 
just parallel is with Tennyson. The Wartons, wandering 
in their woodlands, were confronted with a problem such 
as would be involved, to a couple of youths to-day, in 
considering the reputation of Tennyson and Browning. 

There remains no doubt in my mind, after a close 
examination of such documents as remain to us, that 
Joseph Warton, whose attitude has hitherto been strangely 
neglected, was in fact the active force in this remarkable 
revolt against existing conventions in the world of imagina- 
tive art. His six years of priority would naturally give 
him an advantage over his now better-known and more 
celebrated brother. Moreover, we have positive evidence 
of the firmness of his opinions at a time when his brother 



The Message of the Wartons 69 



Th'omas was still a child. The preface to Joseph's Odes 
of 1746 remains as a dated document, a manifesto, which 
admits of no question. But the most remarkable of his 
poems, " The Enthusiast/' was stated to have been written 
in 1740, when he was eighteen and his brother only twelve 
years of age. It is, of course, possible that these verses, 
which bear no sign of juvenile mentality, were touched up 
at a later date. But this could only be a matter of diction, 
of revision, and we are bound to accept the definite and 
repeated statement of Joseph, that they were essentially 
composed in 1740. If we accept this as a fact, " The 
Enthusiast u is seen to be a document of extraordinary 
importance. I do not speak of the positive merit of the 
poem, which it would be easy to exaggerate. Gray, in 
a phrase which has been much discussed, dismissed the 
poetry of Joseph Wart on by saying that he had " no 
choice at all." It is evident to me that Gray meant by 
this to stigmatise the diction of Joseph Warton, which is 
jejune, verbose, and poor. He had little magic in writing; 
he fails to express himself with creative charm. But this 
is not what constitutes his interest for us, which is more- 
over obscured by the tameness of his Miltonic-Thomsonian 
versification. What should arrest our attention is the fact 
that here, for the first time, we find unwaveringly empha- 
sised and repeated what was entirely new in literature, 
the essence of romantic hysteria. " The Enthusiast" is 
the earliest expression of full revolt against the classical 
attitude which had been sovereign in all European literature 
for nearly a century. ' So completely is this expressed by 
Joseph Warton that it is extremely difficult to realise that 
he could not have come under the fascination of Rousseau, 
whose apprenticeship to love and idleness was now drawing 
to a close at Les Charmettes, and who was not to write 
anything characteristic until ten years later. 

But * these sentiments were in the air. Some of them 



jo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



had vaguely occurred to Young, to Dyer, and to Shenstone, 
all of whom received from Joseph Warton the ardent 
sympathy which a young man renders to his immediate 
contemporaries. The Scotch resumption of ballad-poetry 
held the same relation to the Wartons as the so-called 
Celtic Revival would to a young poet to-day; the Tea- 
Table Miscellany dates from 1724, and Allan Ramsay was 
to the author of " The Enthusiast " what Mr. Yeats is to us. 
But all these were glimmerings or flashes; they followed 
no system, they were accompanied by no principles of 
selection or rejection. These we find for the first time in 
Joseph Warton. He not merely repudiates the old formulas 
and aspirations, but he defines new ones. What is very 
interesting to observe in his attitude to the accepted laws 
of poetical practice is his solicitude for the sensations of 
the individual. These had been reduced to silence by the 
neo-classic school in its determination to insist on broad 
Palladian effects of light and line. The didactic and moral 
aim of the poets had broken the springs of lyrical expres- 
sion, and had replaced those bursts of enthusiasm, those 
indiscretions, those rudenesses which are characteristic of 
a romantic spirit in literature, by eloquence, by caution, 
by reticence and vagueness. 

It is not necessary to indicate more than very briefly 
what the principles of the classic poetry had been. The 
time had passed when readers and writers in England 
gave much attention to the sources of the popular poetry 
of their day. Malherbe had never been known here, and 
the vigorous Art poetique of Boileau, which had been 
eagerly studied at the close of the seventeenth century, 
was forgotten. Even the Prefaces of Dryden had ceased 
to be read, and the sources of authority were now the 
prose of Addison and the verse of Pope. To very young 
readers these stood in the same relation as the writings 
of the post-Tennysonian critics stand now. To reject them, 



The Message of the Wartons 71 



to question their authority, was like eschewing the essays 
of Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater. In particular, the 
Essay on Criticism was still immensely admired and read ; 
it had crystallised around cultivated opinion very much as 
the Studies in the Renaissance did from 1875 onwards. It 
was the last brilliant word on the aims and experiences of 
poetical art, and how brilliant it was can be judged by 
the pleasure with which we read it to-day, in spite of our 
total repudiation of every aesthetic dogma which it conveys. 
It is immortal, like every supreme literary expression, and 
it stands before us in the history of poetry as an enduring 
landmark. This was the apparently impregnable fortress 
which the Wartons had the temerity to bombard. 

Pope had said that Nature was the best guide to judg- 
ment, but what did he mean by nature? He had meant 
the " rules," which he declared were " Nature methodis'd" 
or, as we should say, systematised. The "rules" were 
the maxims, rather than laws, expressed by Aristotle in 
a famous treatise. The poet was to follow the Stagirite, 
" led" — as Pope says in one of those rare lines in which 
he catches, in spite of himself, the Romantic accent — " led 
by the light of the Maeonian Star." Aristotle illustrated 
by Homer — that was to be the standard of all poetic 
expression. But literature had wandered far from Homer, 
and we have to think of what rules the Essay on Criticism 
laid down. The poet was to be cautious, " to avoid 
extremes" : he must be conventional, never " singular" ; 
there was constant reference to "Wit," "Nature," and 
" The Muse," and these were convertible terms. A single 
instance is luminous. We have the positive authority of 
Warburton for saying that Pope regarded as the finest 
effort of his skill and art as a poet the insertion of the 
machinery of the Sylphs into the revised edition of The 
Rape of the Lock (1714). Now this insertion was ingenious, 
brilliant, and in strict accordance with the practice of 



J2 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Vida and of Boileau, both of whom it excelled. But the 
whole conception of it was as unlike that of Romanticism 
as possible. 

In particular, the tendency of the classic school, in its 
later development, had been towards the exclusion of all 
but didactic and ethical considerations from treatment in 
verse. Pope had given great and ever-increasing emphasis 
to the importance of making " morals' 1 prominent in 
poetry. All that he wrote after he retired to Twickenham, 
still a young man, in 1718, was essentially an attempt 
to gather together " moral wisdom " clothed in consummate 
language. He inculcated a moderation of feeling, a broad 
and general study of mankind, an acceptance of the benefits 
of civilisation, and a suppression of individuality. Even 
in so violent and so personal a work as the Dunciad he 
expends all the resources of his genius to make his anger 
seem moral and his indignation a public duty. This con- 
ception of the ethical responsibility of verse was universal, 
and even so late as 1745, long after the composition of 
Warton's " Enthusiast/' we find Blacklock declaring, with 
general acceptance, that " poetical genius depends entirely 
on the quickness of moral feeling/ ' and that not to " feel 
poetry" was the result of having " the affections and 
internal senses depraved by vice." 

The most important innovation suggested by Joseph 
Warton was an outspoken assertion that this was by no 
means the object or the proper theme of poetry. His 
verses and those of his brother, the Essay on Pope of the 
elder, the critical and historical writings of the younger, 
may be searched in vain for the slightest evidence of moral 
or didactic sentiment. The instructive and ethical man- 
nerisms of the later classicists had produced some beautiful 
and more accomplished verse, especially of a descriptive 
order, but its very essence had excluded self-revelation. 
Dennis, at whom Pope taught the world to laugh, but 



The Message of the Wartons 73 



who was in several respects a better critic than either 
Addison or himself, had come close to the truth sometimes, 
but was for ever edged away from it by the intrusion of 
the moral consideration. Dennis feels things aesthetically, 
but he blunders into ethical definition. The result was 
that the range of poetry was narrowed to the sphere of 
didactic reflection, a blunt description of scenery or objects 
being the only relief, since 

" who could take offence 
While pure description held the place of sense ? ' ' 

To have perceived the bankruptcy of the didactic poem 
is Joseph Warton's most remarkable innovation. The 
lawlessness of the Romantic Movement, or rather its instinct 
for insisting that genius is a law unto itself, is first fore- 
shadowed in/' The Enthusiast/ 1 and when the history of 
the school comes to be written there will be a piquancy 
in tracing an antinomianism down from the blameless 
Wartons to the hedonist essays of Oscar Wilde and the 
frenzied anarchism of the Futurists. Not less remarkable, 
or less characteristic, was the revolt against the quietism 
of the classical school. " Avoid extremes," Pope had said, 
and moderation, calmness, discretion, absence of excite- 
ment had been laid down as capital injunctions. Joseph 
Wart on' s very title, " The Enthusiast," was a challenge, 
for " enthusiasm" was a term of reproach. He was him- 
self a scandal to classical reserve. Mant, in the course of 
some excellent lines addressed to Joseph Wart on, remarks 

" Thou didst seek 
Ecstatic vision by the haunted stream 
Or grove of fairy : then thy nightly ear, 
As from the wild notes of some airy harp, 
Thrilled with strange music." 

The same excess of sensibility is still more clearly divulged 
in Joseph's own earliest verses : — 



74 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



" All beauteous Nature ! by thy boundless charms 
Oppress'd, O where shall I begin thy praise, 
Where turn the ecstatic eye, how ease my breast 
That pants with wild astonishment and love ? ** 

The Nature here addressed is a very different thing from 
the " Nature methodis'd" of the Essay on Criticism. It 
is not to be distinguished from the object of pantheistic 
worship long afterwards to be celebrated in widely differing 
language, but with identical devotion, by Wordsworth and 
Senancour, by Chateaubriand and Shelley. 

Closely connected with this attitude towards physical 
nature is the determination to deepen the human interest 
in poetry, to concentrate individuality in passion. At the 
moment when the Wartons put forth their ideas, a change 
was taking place in English poetry, but not in the direction 
of earnest emotion. The instrument of verse had reached 
an extraordinary smoothness, and no instance of its 
capability could be more interesting than the poetry of 
Shenstone, with his perfect utterance of things essentially 
not worth saying. In the most important writers of that 
very exhausted moment, technical skill seems the only 
quality calling for remark, and when we have said all 
that sympathy can say for Whitehead and Akenside, the 
truth remains that the one is vapid, the other empty. 
The Wartons saw that more liberty of imagination was 
wanted, and that the Muse was not born to skim the 
meadows, in short low flights, like a wagtail. They used 
expressions which reveal their ambition. The poet was 
to be " bold, without confine/' and " imagination's char- 
tered libertine M ; like a sort of Alas tor, he was 

" in venturous bark to ride 
Down turbulent Delight's tempestuous tide." 

These are aspirations somewhat absurdly expressed, but 
the aim of them is undeniable and noteworthy. 



The Message of the Wartons 75 



A passion foi; solitude always precedes the romantic 
obsession, and in examining the claim of the Wartons to 
be pioneers, we naturally look for this element. We find 
it abundantly in their early verses. When Thomas was 
only seventeen — the precocity of the brothers was remark- 
able — he wrote a " Pleasures of Melancholy/ ' in which he 
expresses his wish to retire to " solemn glooms, congenial 
to the soul. ,, In the early odes of his brother Joseph we 
find still more clearly indicated the intention to withdraw 
from the world, in order to indulge the susceptibilities of 
the spirit in solitary reflection. A curious air of fore- 
shadowing the theories of Rousseau, to which I have 
already referred, produces an effect which is faintly indi- 
cated, but in its phantom way unique in English literature 
up to that date, 1740. There had been a tendency to the 
sepulchral in the work of several writers, in particular in the 
powerful and preposterous religious verse of Isaac Watts, 
but nothing had been suggested in the pure Romantic style. 

In Joseph Warton, first, we meet with the individualist 
attitude to nature; a slightly hysterical exaggeration 
of feeling which was to be characteristic of romance; 
an intention of escaping from the vanity of mankind by 
an adventure into the wilds; a purpose of recovering 
primitive manners by withdrawing into primitive con- 
ditions ; a passion for what we now consider the drawing- 
master' s theory of the picturesque — the thatched cottage, 
the ruined castle with the moon behind it, the unfettered 
rivulet, the wilderness of 

" the pine-topped precipice 
Abrupt and shaggy." 

There was already the fallacy, to become so irresistibly 
attractive to the next generation, that man in a state of 
civilisation was in a decayed and fallen condition, and 
that to achieve happiness he must wander back into a 



j6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Golden Age. Pope, in verses which had profoundly im- 
pressed two generations, had taken the opposite view, and 
had proved to the satisfaction of theologian and free-thinker 
alike that 

" God and Nature link'd the general frame, 
And bade Self-love and Social be the same." 

Joseph Warton would have nothing to say to Social Love. 
He designed, or pretended to design, to emigrate to the 
backwoods of America, to live 

" With simple Indian swains, that I may hunt 
The boar and tiger through savannahs wild, 
Through fragrant deserts and through citron groves," 

indulging, without the slightest admixture of any active 
moral principle in social life, all the ecstasies, all the 
ravishing emotions, of an abandonment to excessive sensi- 
bility. The soul was to be, no longer the " little bark 
attendant' ' that " pursues the triumph and partakes the 
gale" in Pope's complacent Fourth Epistle, but an aeolian 
harp hung in some cave of a primeval forest for the winds 
to rave across in solitude. 

" Happy the first of men, ere yet confin'd 
To smoky cities." 

Already the voice is that of Obermann, of Rene, of Byron. 

Another point in which the recommendations of the 
Wartons far outran the mediocrity of their execution was 
their theory of description. To comprehend the state of 
mind in which such pieces of stately verse as Parnell's 
Hermit or Addison's Campaign could be regarded as satis- 
factory in the setting of their descriptive ornament we 
must realise the aim which those poets put before them. 
Nothing was to be mentioned by its technical or even by 
its exact name; no clear picture was to be raised before 
the inner eye; nothing was to be left definite or vivid. 



The Message of the Wartons 77 



We shall make a very great mistake if we suppose this 
conventional vagueness to have been accidental, and a 
still greater if we attribute it to a lack of cleverness. When 
Pope referred to the sudden advent of a heavy^ shower at 
a funeral in these terms — 

" "lis done, and nature's various charms decay; 
See gloomy clouds obscure the cheerful day ! 
Now hung with pearls the dropping trees appear, 
Their faded honours scatter 'd on her bier," 

it was not because he had not the skill to come into closer 
touch with reality, but that he did not wish to do so. 
It had been plainly laid down by Malherbe and confirmed 
by Boileau that objects should be named in general, not 
in precise terms. We are really, in studying the descrip- 
tive parts of the Classicist poets, very close to the theories 
of Mallarme and the Symbolists which occupied us twenty 
years ago. The object of the poet was not to present 
a vivid picture to the reader, but to start in him a state 
of mind. 

We must recollect, in considering what may seem to 
us the sterility and stiffness of the English poets from 
1660 to 1740, that they were addressing a public which, 
after the irregular violence and anarchical fancy of the 
middle of the seventeenth century, had begun to yearn 
for regularity, common sense, and a moderation in relative 
variety. The simplest ideas should be chosen, and should 
depend for their poetical effect, not upon a redundant and 
gorgeous ornament, but solely upon elegance of language. 
There were certain references, certain channels of imagery, 
which were purely symbolical, and these could be defended 
only on the understanding that they produced on the 
mind of the reader, instantly and without effort, the illus- 
trative effect required. For instance, with all these neo~ 
classicists, the mythological allusions, which seem vapid and 
ridiculous to us, were simplified metaphor and a question 



78 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



of style. In short, it rested the jaded imagination of 
Europe, after Gongora and Marini, Donne and D'Aubigne, 
to sink back on a poetry which had taken a vow to remain 
scrupulous, elegant, and selected. 

But the imagination of England was now beginning to 
be impatient of these bonds. It was getting tired of a 
rest-cure so prolonged. It asked for more colour, more 
exuberance, more precise reproduction of visual impres- 
sions. Thomson had summed up and had carried to 
greater lengths the instinct for scenery which had never 
entirely died out in England, except for a few years after 
the Restoration. It was left to Joseph Warton, however, 
to rebel against the whole mode in which the cabbage of 
landscape was shredded into the classical pol-au-feu. He 
proposes that, in place of the mention of " Idalia's groves," 
when Windsor Forest is intended, and of milk-white bulls 
sacrificed to Phoebus at Twickenham, the poets should 
boldly mention in their verses English " places remarkably 
romantic, the supposed habitation of druids, bards, and 
wizards/ ' and he vigorously recommends Theocritus as a 
model far superior to Pope because of the greater exactitude 
of his references to objects, and because of his more realistic 
appeal to the imagination. Description, Warton says, 
should be uncommon, exact, not symbolic and allusive, 
but referring to objects clearly, by their real names. He 
very pertinently points out that Pope, in a set piece of 
extraordinary cleverness — which was to be read, more than 
half a century later, even by Wordsworth, with pleasure — 
confines himself to rural beauty in general, and declines 
to call up before us the peculiar beauties which characterise 
the Forest of Windsor. 

A specimen of Joseph Warton' s descriptive poetry may 
here be given, not for its great inherent excellence, but 
because it shows his resistance to the obstinate classic 
mannerism : — 



The Message of the Wartons 79 



" Tell me the path, sweet wanderer, tell, 
To thy unknown sequestered cell, 
Where woodbines cluster round the door, 
Where shells and moss o'erlay the floor, 
And on whose top an hawthorn blows, 
Amid whose thickly-woven boughs 
Some nightingale still builds her nest, 
Each evening warbling thee to rest ; 
Then lay me by the haunted stream, 
Rapt in some wild poetic dream, 
In converse while methinks I rove 
With Spenser through a fairy grove." 

To show how identical were the methods of the two 
brothers we may compare the foregoing lines with the 
following from Thomas Wart on' s " Ode on the Approach 
of Summer " (published when he was twenty-five, and 
possibly written much earlier) : — 

" His wattled cotes the shepherd plaits ; 
Beneath her elm the milkmaid chats ; 
The woodman, speeding home, awhile 
Rests him at a shady stile ; 
Nor wants there fragrance to dispense 
Refreshment o'er my soothed sense ; 
Nor tangled woodbine's balmy bloom, 
Nor grass besprent to breathe perfume, 
Nor lurking wild-thyme's spicy sweet 
To bathe in dew my roving feet ; 
Nor wants there note of Philomel, 
Nor sound of distant-tinkling bell, 
Nor lo wings faint of herds remote, 
Nor mastiff's bark from bosom'd cot ; 
Rustle the breezes lightly borne 
O'er deep embattled ears of corn ; 
Round ancient elms, with humming noise, 
Full loud the chafer-swarms rejoice." 

The youthful poet is in full revolt against the law which 
forbade his elders to mention objects by their plain names. 

Here we notice at once, as we do in similar early effusions 
of both the Wartons, the direct influence of Milton's lyrics. 
To examine the effect of the rediscovery of Milton upon 
the poets of the middle of the eighteenth century would 
lead us too far from the special subject of our inquiry 



80 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



to-day. But it must be pointed out that L' Allegro and 
II Penseroso had been entirely neglected, and practically 
unknown, until a date long after the rehabilitation of 
Paradise Lost. The date at which Handel set them to 
music, 1740, is that of the revived or discovered popularity 
of these two odes, which then began to be fashionable, 
at all events among the younger poets. They formed a 
bridge, which linked the new writers with the early seven- 
teenth century across the Augustan Age, and their versifi- 
cation as well as their method of description were as much 
resisted by the traditional Classicists as they were attractive, 
and directly preferred above those of Pope, by the innovators. 
Joseph Warton, who attributed many of the faults of 
modern lyrical writing to the example of Petrarch, sets 
Milton vehemently over against him, and entreats the 
poets " to accustom themselves to contemplate fully every 
object before they attempt to describe it." They were 
above all to avoid nauseous repetition of commonplaces, 
and what Warton excellently calls " hereditary images." 

We must not, however, confine ourselves to a con- 
sideration of " The Enthusiast " of 1740 and the preface 
to the Odes of 1746. Certain of the expressions, indeed, 
already quoted, are taken from the two very important 
critical works which the brothers published while they 
were still quite young. We must now turn particularly 
to Joseph Warton* s Essay on the Genius of Pope of 1756, 
and to Thomas Warton' s Observations on the Faerie Queene 
of 1754. Of these the former is the more important and 
the more readable. Joseph's Essay on Pope is an extra- 
ordinary production for the time at which it was produced. 
Let me suggest that we make a great mistake in treating 
the works of old writers as if they had been always written 
by old men. I am trying to present the Wartons to you 
as I see them, and that is as enthusiastic youths, flushed 
with a kind of intellectual felicity, and dreaming how 



The Message of the Wartons 81 



poetry shall be produced as musicians make airs, by 
inspiration, not by rote. Remember that when they took 
their walks in the forest at Hackwood, the whole world 
of culture held that true genius had expired with Pope, 
and this view was oracularly supported by Warburton and 
such-like pundits. I have already pointed out to you 
that Pope was divided from them not more than Swinburne 
is divided from us. Conceive two very young men to-day 
putting their heads together to devise a scheme of poetry 
which should entirely supersede that, not of Swinburne 
only, but of Tennyson and Browning also, and you have 
the original attitude of the Wartons. 

It is difficult for us to realise what was the nature of 
the spell which Pope threw over the literary conscience of 
the eighteenth century. Forty years after the revolt of 
the Wartons, Pope was still looked upon by the average 
critic as " the most distinguished and the most interesting 
Poet of the nation/ ' Joseph Warton was styled " the 
Winton Pedant' ' for suggesting that Pope paid too dearly 
for his lucidity and lightness, and for desiring to break 
up with odes and sonnets the oratorical mould which gave 
a monotony of form to early eighteenth-century verse. 
His Essay on Pope, though written with such studied 
moderation that we may, in a hasty reading, regard it 
almost as a eulogy, was so shocking to the prejudices of 
the hour that it was received with universal disfavour, 
and twenty-six years passed before the author had the 
moral courage to pursue it to a conclusion. He dedicated 
it to Young, who, alone of the Augustans, had admitted 
that charm in a melancholy solitude, that beauty of 
funereal and mysterious effects, which was to be one of 
the leading characteristics of the Romantic School, and 
who dimly perceived the sublime and the pathetic to be 
" the two chief nerves of all genuine poetry.' ' 

Warton' s Essay on the Genius of Pope is not well arranged, 

G 



82 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



and, in spite of eloquent passages, as literature it does 
not offer much attraction to the reader of the present 
day. But its thesis is one which is very interesting to 
us, and was of startling novelty when it was advanced. 
In the author's own words it was to prove that " a clear 
head and acute understanding are not sufficient^ alone, to 
make a poet." The custom of critics had been to say 
that, when supported by a profound moral sense, they 
were sufficient, and Pope was pointed to as the over- 
whelming exemplar of the truth of this statement. Pope 
had taken this position himself and, as life advanced, the 
well of pure poetry in him had dried up more and more 
completely, until it had turned into a sort of fountain of 
bright, dry sand, of which the Epilogue to the Satires, 
written in 1738, when Joseph Warton was sixteen years 
of age, may be taken as the extreme instance. The young 
author of the Essay made the earliest attempt which any 
one made to put Pope in his right place, that is to say, 
not to deny him genius or to deprecate the extreme 
pleasure readers found in his writings, but to insist that, 
by the very nature of his gifts, his was genius of a lower 
rank than that of the supreme poets, with whom he was 
commonly paralleled when he was not preferred to them all. 

Warton admitted but three supreme English poets — 
Spenser, Shakespeare, Milton — and he vehemently insisted 
that moral, didactic and panegyrical poetry could never 
rise above the second class in importance. To assert this 
was not merely to offend against the undoubted supremacy 
of Pope, but it was to flout the claims of all those others 
to whom the age gave allegiance. Joseph Warton does 
not shrink from doing this, and he gives reason for abating 
the claims of all the classic favourites— Cowley, Waller, 
Dryden, Addison. When it was advanced against him 
that he showed arrogance in placing his opinion against 
that of a multitude of highly trained judges, he replied 



The Message of the Wartons 83 



that a real "relish and enjoyment of poetry " is a rare 
quality, and "a creative and glowing imagination " pos- 
sessed by few. When the dicta of Boileau were quoted 
against him, he repudiated their authority with scarcely less 
vivacity than Keats was to display half a century later. 

Joseph Warton's Essay wanders about, and we may 
acknowledge ourselves more interested in the mental 
attitude which it displays than in the detail of its criticism. 
The author insists, with much force, on the value of a 
grandiose melancholy and a romantic horror in creating 
a poetical impression, and he allows himself to deplore 
that Pope w r as so ready to forget that " wit and satire 
are transitory and perishable, but nature and passion are 
eternal.' ■ We need not then be surprised when Joseph 
Wart on boldly protests that no other part of the writings 
of Pope approaches Eloisa to Abelard in the quality of 
being " truly poetical.' ' He w r as perhaps led to some 
indulgence by the fact that this is the one composition 
in which Pope appears to be indebted to Milton's lyrics, 
but there was much more than that. So far as I am 
aware, Eloisa to Abelard had never taken a high place 
with Pope's extreme admirers, doubtless because of its 
obsession with horror and passion. But when we read 
how 

" o'er the twilight groves and dusky caves, 
Long-sounding aisles, and intermingled graves, 
Black melancholy sits, and round her throws 
A death-like silence and a dead repose," 

and still more when we reflect on the perpetual and power- 
ful appeals which the poem makes to emotion unbridled 
by moral scruple, we have no difficulty in perceiving why 
Eloisa to Abelard exercised so powerful an attraction on 
Joseph Warton. The absence of ethical reservation, the 
licence, in short, was highly attractive to him, and he 
rejoiced in finding Pope, even so slightly, even so briefly, 



84 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



faithless to his formula. It is worth while to note that 
Joseph Wart 011' s sympathy with the sentimental malady 
of the soul which lies at the core of Romanticism per- 
mitted him to be, perhaps, the first man since the Renais- 
sance who recognised with pleasure the tumult of the Atys 
of Catullus and the febrile sensibility of Sappho. 

Both brothers urged that more liberty of imagination 
was what English poetry needed; that the lark had been 
shut up long enough in a gilded cage. We have a glimpse 
of Thomas Warton introducing the study of the great 
Italian classics into Oxford at a very early age, and we 
see him crowned with laurel in the common-room of 
Trinity College at the age of nineteen. This was in the 
year before the death of Thomson. No doubt he was 
already preparing his Observations on the Faerie Queene, 
which came out a little later. He was Professor of Poetry 
at Oxford before he was thirty. Both the brothers took 
great pleasure in the study of Spenser, and they both 
desired that the supernatural "machinery" of Ariosto, 
in common with the romance of The Faerie Queene, should 
be combined with a description of nature as untrimmed 
and unshackled as possible. Thomas Warton, in his 
remarkable Oxford poem, " The Painted Window," describes 
himself as 

" A faithless truant to the classic page. 
Long have I loved to catch the simple chime 
Of minstrel-harps, and spell the fabling rhyme," 

and again he says : — 

" I soothed my sorrows with the dulcet lore 
Which Fancy fabled in her elfin age," 

that is to say when Spenser was writing " upon Mulla's 
shore." 

After all this, the Observations on the Faerie Queene of 
1754 is rather disappointing. Thomas was probably much 



The Message of the Wartons 85 



more learned as a historian of literature than Joseph, but 
he is not so interesting a critic. Still, he followed exactly 
the same lines, with the addition of a wider knowledge. 
His reading is seen to be already immense, but he is 
tempted to make too tiresome a display of it. Neverthe- 
less, he is as thorough as his brother in his insistence upon 
qualities which we have now learned to call Romantic, 
and he praises all sorts of old books which no one then 
spoke of with respect. He warmly recommends the Morte 
cV Arthur, which had probably not found a single admirer 
since 1634. When he mentions Ben Jonson, it is charac- 
teristic that it is to quote the line about " the charmed 
boats and the enchanted wharves/' which sounds like a 
foretaste of Keats' s magic casements opening on the 
foam of perilous seas." The public of Warton' s day had 
relegated all tales about knights, dragons, and enchanters 
to the nursery, and Thomas Warton shows courage in 
insisting that they are excellent subjects for serious and 
adult literature. He certainly would have thoroughly 
enjoyed the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, whom a later 
generation was to welcome as " the mighty magician bred 
and nourished by the Muses in their sacred solitary caverns, 
amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition/ ' and he 
despised the neo-classic make-believe of grottoes. He says, 
with firmness, that epic poetry — and he is thinking of 
Ariosto, Tasso, and Spenser — would never have been 
written if the critical judgments current in 1754 had been 
in vogue. 

Thomas Warton closely studied the influence of Ariosto 
on Spenser, and no other part of the Observations is so 
valuable as the pages in which those two poets are con- 
trasted. He remarked the polish of the former poet with 
approval, and he did not shrink from what is violently 
fantastic in the plot of the Orlando Furioso. On that 
point he says, " The present age is too fond of manner' d 



86 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



poetry to relish fiction and fable/' but perhaps he did 
not observe that although there is no chivalry in The 
Schoolmistress, that accomplished piece was the indirect 
outcome of the Italian mock-heroic epics. The Classicists 
had fought for lucidity and common sense, whereas to 
be tenebrous and vague was a merit with the precursors 
of Romanticism, or at least, without unfairness, we may 
say that they asserted the power of imagination to make 
what was mysterious, and even fabulous, true to the 
fancy. This tendency, which we first perceive in the 
Wartons, rapidly developed, and it led to the blind enthu- 
siasm with w T hich the vapourings of Macpherson were 
presently received. The earliest specimens of Ossian were 
revealed to a too-credulous public in 1760, but I find no 
evidence of any welcome which they received from either 
Joseph or Thomas. The brothers personally preferred a 
livelier and more dramatic presentation, and when Dr. 
Johnson laughed at Collins because " he loved fairies, 
genii, giants, and monsters/' the laugh was really at the 
expense of his school-fellow Joseph Warton, to whom 
Collins seems to have owed his boyish inspiration, although 
he was by a few months the senior. 

Johnson was a resolute opponent of the principles of 
the Wartons, though he held Thomas, at least, in great 
personal regard. He objected to the brothers that they 
" affected the obsolete when it was not worthy of revival/' 
and his bouiade about their own poetry is well known : — 

" Phrase that time hath flung away, 
Uncouth words in disarray, 
Trick'd in antique ruff and bonnet, 
Ode and elegy and sonnet." 

This conservatism was not peculiar to Johnson ; there was 
a general tendency to resist the reintroduction into language 
and literature of words and forms which had been allowed 
to disappear. A generation later, a careful and thoughtful 



The Message of the Wartons 87 



grammarian like Gilpin was in danger of being dismissed 
as " a cockscomb " because he tried to enlarge our national 
vocabulary. The Wartons were accused of searching old 
libraries for glossaries of disused terms in order to display 
them in their own writings. This was not quite an idle 
charge ; it is to be noted as one of the symptoms of active 
Romanticism that it is always dissatisfied with the diction 
commonly in use, and desires to dazzle and mystify by 
embroidering its texture with archaic and far-fetched words. 
Chatterton, who was not yet born when the Wartons formed 
and expressed their ideas, was to carry this instinct to a 
preposterous extreme in his Rowley forgeries, where he 
tries to obtain a mediaeval colouring by transferring words 
out of an imperfect Anglo-Saxon lexicon, often without 
discerning the actual meaning of those words. 

Both the Wartons continued, in successive disquisitions, 
to repeat their definition of poetry, but it cannot be said 
that either of them advanced. So far as Joseph is con- 
cerned, he seems early to have succumbed to the pressure 
of the age and of his surroundings. In 1766 he became 
head master of Winchester, and settled down after curious 
escapades which had nothing poetical about them. In 
the head master of a great public school, reiterated murmurs 
against bondage to the Classical Greeks and Romans would 
have been unbecoming, and Joseph Warton was a man of 
the world. Perhaps in the solitude of his study he mur- 
mured, as disenchanted enthusiasts often murmur, " Say, 
are the days of blest delusion fled? " Yet traces of the 
old fire were occasionally manifest ; still each brother woke 
up at intervals to censure the criticism of those who did 
not see that imagination must be paramount in poetry, 
and who made the mistake of putting " discernment " in 
the place of " enthusiasm/' I hardly know why it gives 
me great pleasure to learn that " the manner in -which the 
Rev. Mr. Joseph Warton read the Communion Service was 



88 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



remarkably awful," but it must be as an evidence that 
he carried a " Gothick " manner into daily life. 

The spirit of pedantry, so amicably mocked by the 
Wartons, took its revenge upon Thomas in the form of 
a barren demon named Joseph Ritson, who addressed to 
him in 1782 what he aptly called A Familiar Letter. 
There is hardly a more ferocious pamphlet in the whole 
history of literature. Ritson, who had the virulence of a 
hornet and the same insect's inability to produce honey 
of his own, was considered by the reactionaries to have 
" punched Tom Warton' s historick body full of deadly 
holes/ ' But his strictures were not really important. In 
marshalling some thousands of facts, Warton had made 
perhaps a couple of dozen mistakes, and Ritson advances 
these with a reiteration and a violence worthy of a maniac. 
Moreover, and this is the fate of angry pedants, he himself 
is often found to be as dustily incorrect as Warton when 
examined by modem lights. Ritson, who accuses Warton 
of " never having consulted or even seen" the books he 
quotes from, and of intentionally swindling the public, 
was in private life a vegetarian who is said to have turned 
his orphan nephew on to the streets because he caught 
him eating a mutton-chop. Ritson flung his arrows far 
and wide, for he called Dr. Samuel Johnson himself " that 
great luminary, or rather dark lantern of literature." 

If we turn over Ritson' s distasteful pages, it is only 
to obtain from them further proof of the perception of 
Warton's Romanticism by an adversary whom hatred 
made perspicacious. Ritson abuses the History of English 
Poetry for presuming to have " rescued from oblivion 
irregular beauties " of which no one desired to be reminded. 
He charges Warton with recommending the poetry of " our 
Pagan fathers" because it is untouched by Christianity, 
and of saying that " religion and poetry are incompatible." 
He accuses him of " constantly busying himself with pas- 



The Message of the Wartons 89 



sages which he does not understand, because they appeal 
to his ear or his fancy.' ' " Old poetry/' Ritson says to 
Warton, " is the same thing to you, sense or nonsense." 
He dwells on Warton' s marked attraction to whatever is 
prodigious and impossible. The manner in which these 
accusations are made is insolent and detestable; but 
Ritson had penetration, and without knowing what he 
reached, in some of these diatribes he pierced to the heart 
of the Romanticist fallacy. 

It is needful that I should bring these observations to 
a close. I hope I have made good my claim that it was 
the Wartons who introduced into the discussion of English 
poetry the principle of Romanticism. To use a metaphor 
of which both of them would have approved, that principle 
was to them like the mystical bowl of ichor, the ampolla, 
which Astolpho was expected to bring down from heaven 
in the Orlando Furioso. If I have given you an exaggerated 
idea of the extent to which they foresaw the momentous 
change in English literature, I am to blame. No doubt 
by extracting a great number of slight and minute remarks, 
and by putting them together, the critic may produce an 
effect which is too emphatic. But you will be on your 
guard against such misdirection. It is enough for me if 
you will admit the priority of the intuition of the brothers, 
and I do not think that it can be contested. 

Thomas Warton said, " I have rejected the ideas of 
men who are the most distinguished ornaments" of 
the history of English poetry, and he appealed against 
a "mechanical" attitude towards the art of poetry. 
The brothers did more in rebelling against the Classic 
formulas than in starting new poetic methods. There was 
an absence in them of " the pomps and prodigality " of 
genius of which Gray spoke in a noble stanza. They 
began with enthusiasm, but they had no native richness 
of expression, no store of energy. It needed a nature as 



90 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



unfettered as Blake's, as wide as Wordsworth's, as opulent 
as Keats' s, to push the Romantic attack on to victory. 
The instinct for ecstasy, ravishment, the caprices and 
vagaries of emotion, was there ; there was present in both 
brothers, while they were still young, an extreme sensi- 
bility. The instinct was present in them, but the sacred 
fire died out in the vacuum of their social experience, and 
neither Warton had the energy to build up a style in prose 
or verse. They struggled for a little while, and then they 
succumbed to the worn verbiage of their age, from which 
it is sometimes no light task to disengage their thought. 
In their later days they made some sad defections, and I 
can never forgive Thomas Warton for arriving at Marlowe's 
Hero and Lcander and failing to observe its beauties. We 
are told that as Camden Professor he " suffered the rostrum 
to grow cold," and he was an ineffective poet laureate. 
His brother Joseph felt the necessity or the craving for 
lyrical expression, without attaining more than a muffled 
and a second-rate effect. 

All this has to be sadly admitted. But the fact remains 
that between 1740 and 1750, while even the voice of 
Rousseau had not begun to make itself heard in Europe, the 
Wartons had discovered the fallacy of the poetic theories 
admitted in their day, and had formed some faint con- 
ception of a mode of escape from them. The Abbe Du 
Bos had laid down in his celebrated Reflexions (1719) that 
the poet's art consists of making a general moral repre- 
sentation of incidents and scenes, and embellishing it with 
elegant images. This had been accepted and acted upon 
by Pope and by all his followers. To have been the first 
to perceive the inadequacy and the falsity of a law which 
excluded all imagination, all enthusiasm, and all mystery, 
is to demand respectful attention from the historian of 
Romanticism, and this attention is due to Joseph and 
Thomas Warton. 



THE CHARM OF STERNE 



THE CHARM OF STERNE 1 



It is exactly two hundred years to-night since there was 
born, at Clonmel, in Ireland, a son to a subaltern in an 
English regiment just home from the Low Countries. " My 
birthday," Laurence Sterne tells us, " was ominous to my 
poor father, who was, the day after our arrival, with many 
other brave officers, broke and sent adrift into the wide 
world with a wife and two children/ ' The life of the new 
baby was one of perpetual hurry and scurry; his mother, 
who had been an old campaigner, daughter of what her 
son calls " a noted suttler" called Nuttle, had been the 
widow of a soldier before she married Roger Sterne. In 
the extraordinary fashion of the army of those days, the 
regiment was hurried from place to place — as was that of 
the father of the infant Borrow a century later — and with 
it hastened the unhappy Mrs. Sterne, for ever bearing and 
for ever losing children, " most rueful journeys/' marked 
by a long succession of little tombstones left behind. 
Finally, at Gibraltar, the weary father, pugnacious to the 
last, picked a quarrel about a goose and was pinked through 
the body, surviving in a thoroughly damaged condition, 
to die, poor exhausted pilgrim of Bellona, in barracks in 
Jamaica. 

It would be difficult to imagine a childhood better cal- 
culated than this to encourage pathos in a humorist and 
fun in a sentimentalist. His account, in his brief auto- 

1 Address delivered to the Authors' Club, November 24th, 191 3. 

93 



94 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



biography, of the appearance and disappearance of his 
hapless brothers and sisters is a proof of how early life 
appealed to Laurence Sterne in the dappled colours of 
an April day. We read there of how at Wicklow " we lost 
poor Joram, a pretty boy " ; how " Anne, that pretty blos- 
som, fell in the barracks of Dublin' ' ; how little Devijehar 
was " left behind u in Carrickfergus. We know not whether 
to sob or to giggle, so tragic is the rapid catalogue of dying 
babies, so ridiculous are their names and fates. Here, then, 
I think, we have revealed to us the prime characteristic of 
Sterne, from which all his other characteristics branch away, 
for evil or for good. As no other writer since Shakespeare, 
and in a different and perhaps more intimate way than even 
Shakespeare, he possessed the key of those tears that suc- 
ceed the hysteria of laughter, and of that laughter which 
succeeds the passion of tears. From early childhood, and 
all through youth and manhood, he had been collecting 
observations upon human nature in these rapidly alternating 
moods. 

He observed it in its frailty, but being exquisitely frail 
himself, he was no satirist. A breath of real satire would 
blow down the whole delicate fabric of Tristram Shandy 
and the Sentimental Journey. Sterne pokes fun at people 
and things ; he banters the extravagance of private humour ; 
but it is always with a consciousness that he is himself 
more extravagant than any one. If we compare him for a 
moment with Richardson, who buttonholes the reader in 
a sermon; or with Smollett, who snarls and bites like an 
angry beast ; we feel at once that Sterne could not breathe 
in the stuffiness of the one or in the tempest of the other. 
Sympathy is the breath of his nostrils, and he cannot exist 
except in a tender, merry relation with his readers. His 
own ideal, surely, is that which he attributed to the fantastic 
and gentle Yorick, who never could enter a village, but 
he caught the attention of old and young. " Labour stood 



The Charm of Sterne 95 



still as he passed ; the bucket hung suspended in the middle 
of the well; the spinning-wheel forgot its round, even 
chuck-farthing and shuffle- cap themselves stood gaping till 
he had got out of sight." Like Yorick, Sterne loved a 
jest in his heart. 

There are, it seems to me, two distinct strains in the 
intellectual development of Sterne, and I should like to 
dwell upon them for a moment, because I think a lack of 
recognition of them has been apt to darken critical counsel 
in the consideration of his writings. You will remember 
that he was forty-six years of age before he took up the 
business of literature seriously. Until that time he had been 
a country parson in Yorkshire, carrying his body, that 
" cadaverous bale of goods/' from Sutton to Stillington, 
and from Stillington to Skelton. He had spent his life in 
riding, shooting, preaching, joking, and philandering in 
company, and after a fashion, most truly reprehensible from 
a clerical point of view, yet admirably fitted to prepare such 
an artist for his destined labours as a painter of the oddities 
of average Englishmen. But by the side of this indolent 
search after the enjoyment of the hour, Sterne cultivated 
a formidable species of literature in which he had so few 
competitors that, in after years, his indolence prompted him 
to plagiarise freely from sources which, surely, no human 
being would discover. He steeped himself in the cumbrous 
learning of those writers of the Renaissance in whom 
congested Latin is found tottering into colloquial French. 
He studied Rabelais perhaps more deeply than any 
other Englishman of his time, and certainly Beroalde de 
Verville, Bruscambille, and other absurdities of the six- 
teenth century were familiar to him and to him alone in 
England. 

Hence, when Sterne began to write, there were two 
streams flowing in his brain, and these were, like everything 
else about him, inconsistent with one another. The faithful 



96 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



tender colour of modern life competed with the preposterous 
oddity of burlesque erudition. When he started the annals 
of Tristram Shandy, the Rabelais vein was in the ascendant, 
and there is plenty of evidence that it vastly dazzled and 
entertained readers of that day. But it no longer entertains 
us very much, and it is the source of considerable injustice 
done by modern criticism to the real merits of Sterne. 
When so acute a writer as Bagehot condemns much of 
Tristram Shandy as " a sort of antediluvian fun, in which 
uncouth saurian jokes play idly in an unintelligible world/' 
he hits the nail on the head of why so many readers now- 
adays turn with impatience from that work. But they should 
persevere, for Sterne himself saw his error, and gradually 
dropped the " uncouth saurian jokes" which he had filched 
out of Burton and Beroalde, relying more and more exclu- 
sively on his own rich store of observations taken directly 
from human nature. In the adorable seventh volume of 
Tristram, and in The Sentimental Journey, there is nothing 
left of Rabelais except a certain rambling artifice of 
style. 

The death of Sterne, at the age of fifty-four, is one of 
those events which must be continually regretted, because 
to the very end of his life he was growing in ease and ripe- 
ness, was discovering more perfect modes of self-expression, 
and was purging himself of his compromising intellectual 
frailties. It is true that from the very first his excellences 
were patent. The portrait of my Uncle Toby, which 
Hazlitt truly said is " one of the finest compliments ever 
paid to human nature," occurs, or rather begins, in the 
second volume of Tristram Shandy. But the marvellous 
portraits which the early sections of that work contain are 
to some extent obscured, or diluted, by the author's deter- 
mination to gain piquancy by applying old methods to new 
subjects. Frankly, much as I love Sterne, I find Kuna- 
strockius and Lithopaedus a bore. I suspect they have 



The Charm of Sterne 97 



driven more than one modern reader away from the enjoy- 
ment of Tristram Shandy. 

Towards the end of the eighteenth century a leading 
Dissenting minister, the Rev. Joseph Fawcett, said in 
answer to a question : " Do I like Sterne? Yes, to be sure, 
I should deserve to be hanged if I didn't ! " That was 
the attitude of thoughtful and scrupulous people of cultiva- 
tion more than one hundred years ago. But it was their 
attitude only on some occasions. There is no record of 
the fact, but I am ready to believe that Mr. Fawcett may, 
with equal sincerity, have said that Sterne was a godless 
wretch. We know that Bishop Warburton presented him 
with a purse of gold, in rapturous appreciation of his 
talents, and then in a different mood described him as "an 
irrevocable scoundrel/' No one else has ever flourished 
in literature who has combined such alternating powers of 
attraction and repulsion. We like Sterne extremely at one 
moment, and we dislike him no less violently at another. 
He is attar of roses to-day and asafoetida to-morrow, and 
it is not by any means easy to define the elements which 
draw us towards him and away from him. Like Yorick, 
he had " a wild way of talking," and he wrote impetuously 
and impudently " in the naked temper which a merry heart 
discovered/' As he " seldom shunned occasions of saying 
what came uppermost, and without much ceremony, he had 
but too many temptations in life of scattering his wit and 
his humour, his gibes and his jests, about him." 

So that even if he had been merely Yorick, Sterne would 
have had manifold opportunities of giving offence and 
causing scandal. But he was not only a humorist with 
" a thousand little sceptical notions to defend," but he was 
a sentimentalist as well. These two characteristics he was 
constantly mingling, or trying to mingle, since sentimentality 
and humour are in reality like oil and wine. He would 
exasperate his readers by throwing his wig in their faces 

H 



98 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



at the moment when they were weeping, or put them out 
of countenance by ending a farcical story on a melancholy 
note. A great majority of Englishmen like to be quite 
sure of the tone of what they read ; they -wish an author 
to be straightforward; they dread irony and they loathe 
impishness. Now Sterne is the most impish of all imagin- 
ative writers. He is what our grandmothers, in describing 
the vagaries of the nursery, used to call " a limb of Satan." 
Tristram Shandy, in his light-hearted way, declared that 
" there's not so much difference between good and evil as 
the world is apt to imagine/ ' No doubt that is so, but the 
world does not like its preachers to play fast and loose with 
moral definitions. 

The famous sensibility of Sterne was a reaction against 
the seriousness, the ponderosity, of previous prose literature 
in England. We talk of the heaviness of the eighteenth 
century, .but the periods of even such masters of solid 
rhetoric as Johnson and Gibbon are light as thistledown in 
comparison with the academic prose of the seventeenth 
century. Before the eighteenth century is called lumbering, 
let us set a page of Hume against a page of Hobbes, or a 
passage out of Berkeley by a passage out of Selden. Com- 
mon justice is seldom done to the steady clarification of 
English prose between 1660 and 1750, but it was kept 
within formal lines until the sensitive recklessness of 
Sterne broke up the mould, and gave it the flying forms 
of a cloud or a wave. He owed this beautiful inspiration 
to what Nietzsche calls his " squirrel-soul," which leaped 
from bough to bough, and responded without a trace of 
conventional restraint to every gust of emotion. Well 
might Goethe be inspired to declare that Sterne was the 
most emancipated spirit of his century. 

His very emancipation gives us the reason why Sterne's 
admirers nowadays are often divided in their allegiance to 
him. A frequent part of his humour deals very flippantly 



The Charm of Sterne 99 



with subjects that are what we have been taught to consider 
indelicate or objectionable. It is worse than useless to try 
to explain this foible of his away, because he was aware 
of it and did it on purpose. He said that " nothing but the 
more gross and carnal parts of a composition will go down." 
His indecency was objected to in his own age, but not with 
any excluding severity. And I would like to call your 
attention to the curious conventionality of our views on 
this subject. Human nature does not change, but it 
changes its modes of expression. In the eighteenth century 
very grave people, even bishops, allowed themselves, in 
their relaxed moments, great licence in jesting. Yet they 
would have been scandalised by the tragic treatment of sex 
by our more audacious novelists of to-day. We are still 
interested in these matters, but we have agreed not to joke 
about them. I read the other day a dictum of one of those 
young gentlemen who act as our moral policemen : he 
prophesied that a jest on a sexual subject would, in twenty 
years, be not merely reprehensible, as it is now, but un- 
intelligible. Very proper, no doubt, only do not let us 
call this morality, it is only a change of habits. 

Sterne is not suited to readers who are disheartened at 
irrelevancy. It is part of his charm, and it is at the same 
time his most whimsical habit, never to proceed with his 
story when you expect him to do so, and to be reminded 
by his own divagations of delightful side-issues which lead 
you, entranced, whither you had no intention of going. 
He did not merely not shun occasions of being irrelevant, 
but he sought them out and eagerly cultivated them. 
Remember that a whole chapter of Tristram is devoted 
to the attitude of Corporal Trim as he prepared himself 
to read the Sermon. Sterne kept a stable of prancing, 
plump little hobby-horses, and he trotted them out upon 
every occasion. But this is what makes his books the best 
conversational writing in the English language. He writes 



ioo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



for all the world exactly as though he were talking at his 
ease, and we listen enchanted to the careless, frolicking, 
idle, penetrating speaker who builds up for us so nonchal- 
antly, with persistent but unobtrusive touch upon touch, 
the immortal figures of Mr. Shandy, my Uncle Toby, Trim, 
Yorick, the Widow Wadman, and so many more. 

This, I am inclined to think, in drawing this brief sketch 
to an end, is Sterne's main interest for ourselves. He broke 
up the rhetorical manner of composition, or, rather, he 
produced an alternative manner which was gradually 
accepted and is in partial favour still. I would ask you 
to read for yourselves the scene of the ass who blocked 
the way for Tristram at Lyons, and to consider how com- 
pletely new that method of describing, of facing a literary 
problem, was in 1765. I speak here to an audience of 
experts, to a company of authors who are accustomed to 
a close consideration of the workmanship of their metier. 
I ask them where, at all events in English, anything like 
that scene had been found before the days of Sterne. Since 
those days we have never been without it. 

To trace the Shandean influence down English literature 
for the last century and a half would take me much too 
long for your patience. In Dickens, in Carlyle, even in 
Ruskin, the Shandean element is often present and not 
rarely predominant. None of those great men would 
have expressed himself exactly as he does but for Laurence 
Sterne. And coming down to our own time, I see the in- 
fluence of Sterne everywhere. The pathos of Sir James 
Barrie is intimately related to that of the creator of Uncle 
Toby and Maria of Moulines, while I am not sure that of 
all the books which Stevenson read it was not the Senti- 
mental Journey which made the deepest impression upon 
him. 



THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR 
ALLAN POE 



THE CENTENARY OF EDGAR 



ALLAN POE 

In the announcements of the approaching celebration 
of the centenary of Poe in this country, the fact of his 
having been a poet was concealed. Perhaps his admirers 
hoped that it might be overlooked, as without importance, 
or condoned as the result of bad habits. At all events, 
the statement that the revels on that occasion would be 
conducted by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was quite enough to 
prove that it was the prose writer of " The Black Cat " and 
" The Murders in the Rue Morgue/' and not the verse 
writer of "Ulalume" and "Annabel Lee" who would be 
the centre of attention. On that side of Poe's genius, 
therefore, although it is illustrated by such masterpieces of 
sullen beauty as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and 
such triumphs of fantastic ingenuity as " The Gold Bug," 
I feel it needless to dwell here, the more as I think the 
importance of these tales very slight by the side of that of 
the best poems. Edgar Poe wa^, in my opinion, one of 
the most significant poetic artists of a century rich in poetic 
artists, and I hold it to be for this reason, and not because 
he wrote thrilling "detective" stories, that he deserves 
persistent commemoration. 

The dominance of Poe as an important poetic factor of 
the nineteenth century has not been easily or universally 
admitted, and it is only natural to examine both the phe- 
nomena and the causes of the objections so persistently 
brought against it. In the first instance, if the fame of 

103 



104 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Browning and Tennyson advanced slowly, it advanced 
firmly, and it was encouraged from the beginning by the 
experts, by the cultivated minority. Poe, on the other 
hand, was challenged, and his credentials were grudgingly 
inspected, by those who represented the finest culture of 
his own country, and the carpings of New England criticism 
are not quite silent yet. When he died, in 1849, the tribunal 
of American letters sat at Cambridge, in the neighbourhood 
of Boston, and it was ill-prepared to believe that anything 
poetical could deserve salvation if it proceeded from a 
place outside the magic circle. Edgar Poe, the son of Irish 
strolling players, called " The Virginia Comedians/' settled 
in the South and was educated in England. By an odd 
coincidence, it now appears that he actually was a native, 
as it were by accident, of Boston itself. In the words of 
the Psalmist, " Lo I there was he born ! " This Gentile 
poet, such was the then state of American literature, could 
not arrive on earth elsewhere than in the Jerusalem of 
Massachusetts. But that concession was not known to 
the high priests, the Lowells, the Holmeses, the Nortons, 
to whom Poe seemed a piratical intruder from Javan or 
Gadire. 

Nothing is so discouraging to a young poet of originality 
as to find himself isolated. Everything new is regarded 
with suspicion and dislike by the general world of readers, 
and usually by the leaders of criticism as well. Yet the 
daring prophet feels supported if he has but his Aaron and 
his Hur. In the generation that immediately preceded 
Poe, Wordsworth and Coleridge had been derided, but they 
had enjoyed the emphatic approbation of one another and 
of Southey. Shelley had been a pariah of letters, yet he 
was cordially believed in by Byron and by Peacock. Even 
Keats could shrink from the mud-storms of the Scotch 
reviewers behind the confident zeal of Leigh Hunt and 
Reynolds. At a still later moment Rossetti and Morris 



The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 105 



would shelter themselves securely, and even serenely, from 
the obloquy of criticism, within a slender peel-tower of the 
praise of friends. In all these cases there could be set 
against the stupidity of the world at large the comfortable 
cleverness of a few strong persons of taste, founded, as all 
good taste must be, upon principles. The poet could pride 
himself on his eclecticism, on his recognition within, as 
Keats said, " a little clan." But Poe's misfortune was to 
have no clan of his own, and to be rejected by precisely 
those persons who represented, and on the whole justly 
represented, good taste in America. 

His behaviour in this predicament was what might have 
been expected from a man whose genius was more consider- 
able than his judgment or his manners. He tried, at first, 
to conciliate the New England authorities, and he flattered 
not merely the greater planets but some of the very little 
stars. He danced, a plaintive Salome, before Christopher 
P. Cranch and Nathaniel P. Willis. When he found that 
his blandishments were of no avail, he turned savage, and 
tried to prove that he did not care, by being rude to Bryant 
and Longfellow. He called the whole solemn Sanhedrim a 
college of Frog-pondian professors. Thus, of course, he 
closed upon himself the doors of mercy, since the central 
aim and object of the excellent men who at that time ruled 
American literature was to prove that, in what this im- 
pertinent young man from Virginia called the Frog Pond, 
the United States possessed its Athens and its Weimar, its 
home of impeccable distinction. Indeed, but for the 
recognition of Europe, which began to flow in richly just 
as Poe ceased to be able to enjoy it, the prestige of this 
remarkable poet might have been successfully annihilated. 

Nor was it only the synod of Boston wits who issued the 
edict that he should be ignored, but in England also many 
good judges of literature, especially those who belonged to 
the intellectual rather than the artistic class, could not 



io6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



away with him. I recollect hearing Leslie Stephen say, 
now nearly thirty years ago, that to employ strong terms 
of praise for Poe was " simply preposterous." And one 
whom I admire so implicitly that I will not mention his 
name in a context which is not favourable to his judgment, 
wrote (in his haste) of Poe's " singularly valueless verses." 

This opposition, modified, it is true, by the very different 
attitude adopted by Tennyson and most subsequent Eng- 
lish poets, as well as by Baudelaire, Mallarme and the 
w T hole younger school in France, was obstinately preserved, 
and has not wholly subsided. It would be a tactical mis- 
take for those who wish to insist on Poe's supremacy in his 
own line to ignore the serious resistance which has been 
made to it. In the canonisation-trial of this whimsical 
saint, the Devil's advocates, it may be confessed, are 
many, and their objections are imposing. It is possible 
that local pique and a horror of certain crude surroundings 
may have had something to do with the original want of 
recognition in New England, but such sources of prejudice 
would be ephemeral. There remained, and has continued 
to remain, in the very essence of Poe's poetry, something 
which a great many sincere and penetrating lovers of verse 
cannot endure to admit as a dominant characteristic of 
the art. 

To recognise the nature of this quality is to take the 
first step towards discovering the actual essence of Pope's 
genius. His detractors have said that his verses are 
" singularly valueless." It is therefore necessary to 
define what it is they mean by " value." If they mean 
an inculcation, in beautiful forms, of moral truth ; if they 
mean a succession of ideas, clothed in exalted and yet 
definite language; if they are thinking of what stirs the 
heart in reading parts of Hamlet and Comus, of what 
keeps the pulse vibrating after the " Ode to Duty " has 
been recited; then the verses of Poe are indeed without 



The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 107 



value. A poet less gnomic than Poe, one from whom less, 
as they say in the suburbs, " can be learned," is scarcely 
to be found in the whole range of literature. His lack of 
curiosity about moral ideas is so complete that evil moves 
him no more than good. There have been writers of 
eccentric or perverse morality who have been so much 
irritated by the preaching of virtue that they have lent 
their genius to the recommendation of vice. This inversion 
of moral fervour is perhaps the source of most that is 
vaguely called " immoral" in imaginative literature. But 
Edgar Poe is as innocent of immorality as he is of morality. 
No more innocuous flowers than his are grown through the 
length and breadth of Parnassus. There is hardly a phrase 
in his collected writings which has a bearing upon any 
ethical question, and those who look for what Wordsworth 
called " chains of valuable thoughts" must go elsewhere. 

In 1840 they might, in New England, go to Bryant, to 
Emerson, to Hawthorne; and it is more than excusable 
that those who were endeavouring to refine the very crude 
community in the midst of which they were anxiously 
holding up the agate lamp of Psyche, should see nothing 
to applaud in the vague and shadowy rhapsodies then 
being issued by a dissipated hack in Philadelphia. What 
the New England critics wanted, patriotically as well as 
personally, was as little like "Ulalume" as can possibly 
be conceived. They defined what poetry should be — 
there was about that time a mania for defining poetry — 
and what their definition was may be seen no less plainly 
in the American Fable for Critics than in the preface 
to the English Philip van Artevelde. It was to be 
picturesque, intellectual, pleasing; it was to deal, above 
all, with moral " truths " ; it was to avoid vagueness and 
to give no uncertain sound; it was to regard " passion" 
with alarm, as the siren which was bound sooner or later 
to fling a bard upon the rocks. It is not necessary to treat 



1 08 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



this conception of poetry with' scorn, nor to reject prin- 
ciples of precise thought and clear, sober language, which 
had been illustrated by Wordsworth in the present and by 
Gray in the past. The ardent young critics of our own age, 
having thrown off all respect for the traditions of literature, 
speak and write as if to them, and them alone, had been 
divinely revealed the secrets of taste. They do not give 
themselves time to realise that in Apollo's house there are 
many mansions. 

It is sufficient for us to note here that the discomfort 
of Poe's position resided in the fact that he was not ad- 
mitted into so much as the forecourt of the particular 
mansion inhabited by Bryant and Lowell. There is a 
phrase in one of his own rather vague and " valueless " 
essays (for Poe was a poor critic) which, as it were acci- 
dentally, describes his ideal in poetry, although it is not 
his own verse of which he is speaking. He described — in 
1845, when his ripe genius had just brought forth " The 
Raven" — the poetic faculty as producing "a sense of 
dreamy, wild, indefinite, and he would perhaps say, in- 
definable delight." This shadowy but absorbing and 
mastering pleasure impregnated his own best writings to 
such a degree that it gives us the measure of his unlike- 
ness to his contemporaries, and states the claim of his 
individuality. Without precisely knowing it or perceiving 
his revolution, in an age of intelligent, tame, lucid and 
cautiously -defined poetry, Edgar Poe expressed the emo- 
tions which surged within him in numbers that were, even 
to excess, " dreamy, wild, indefinite and indefinable/ ' 

His early verses are remarkably exempt from the in- 
fluences which we might expect to find impressed on 
them. He imitated, as every man of genuine originality 
imitates while he learns his trade, but his models were not, 
as might have been anticipated, Coleridge and Shelley; 
they were Byron and Scott. In the poetry of Byron and 



The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 109 



Scott, Poe found nothing to transfer to his own nature, 
and the early imitations, therefore, left no trace on him. 
Brief as is the volume of his poems, half of it might be 
discarded without much regret. Scattered among his 
Byron and Scott imitations, however, we find a few pieces 
which reveal to us that, while he was still almost a child, 
the true direction of his genius was occasionally revealed 
to him. The lyric " To Helen/ ' which is said to have 
been composed in his fourteenth year, is steeped in the 
peculiar purity, richness and vagueness which were to 
characterise his mature poems: — » 

" On desperate seas long wont to roam, 
Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, . 
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home 

To the glory that was Greece, 
And the grandeur that was Rome." 

This was not published, however, until the author was two- 
and-twenty, and it may have been touched up. Here is 
a fragment of a suppressed poem, " Visit of the Dead," 
which Poe certainly printed in his eighteenth year : — 

" The breeze, the breath of God, is still, 
And the mist upon the hill, 
Shadowy, shadowy, yet unbroken, 
Is a symbol and a token ; 
How it hangs upon the trees, 
A mystery of mysteries ! " 

This is not so perfect, but it is even more than " To Helen " 
symptomatic of Poe's peculiar relation to the poetic faculty 
as fostering a state of indefinite and indeed indefinable 
delight. And from these faint breathings how direct is 
the advance to such incomparable specimens of symbolic 
fancy as " The City in the Sea," " The Sleeper," and 
finally "Ulalume" ! 

The determination to celebrate, in a minor key, in- 
definite and melancholy symbols of fancy, is a snare than 



iio Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



which none more dangerous can be placed in the path of 
a feeble foot. But Poe was not feeble, and he was pro- 
tected, and permanent value was secured for his poetry, 
by the possession of one or two signal gifts to which atten- 
tion must now be paid. He cultivated the indefinite, but, 
happily for us, in language so definite and pure that when 
he succeeds it is with a cool fulness, an absence of all 
fretting and hissing sound, such as can rarely be paralleled 
in English literature. The finest things in Milton's 1645 
volume, Wordsworth at his very best, Tennyson occa- 
sionally, Collins in some of his shorter odes, have reached 
that perfection of syllabic sweetness, that clear sound 
of a wave breaking on the twilight sands, which Poe 
contrives to render, without an effort, again and again : — 

" By a route obscure and lonely, 
Haunted by ill angels only, 
Where an Eidolon, 1 nam'd Night, 
On a black throne reigns upright, 
I have reached these lands but newly 
From an ultimate dim Thule, 
From a wild weird clime, that lieth, sublime. 
Out of space, out of time/' 

The present moment is one in which the reaction against 
plastic beauty in poetry has reached such a height that it 
is almost vain to appeal against it. There is scarcely a 
single English poet of consequence in the younger school 
who does not treat the strings of his lyre as though he were 
preluding with a slate-pencil upon a slate. That this is 
done purposely, and in accordance with mysterious har- 
monic laws entirely beyond the comprehension of ordinary 
ears, makes the matter worse. There is no heresiarch so 
dangerous as the priest of holy and self-abnegating life, 
and it is to a poet no less learned than Mr. Robert Bridges, 
that the twentieth century seems to owe the existing rage 

1 A shocking false quantity; but how little that would matter 
to Poe ! 



The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 1 1 1 



for cacophony. He holds something of the same place in 
relation to Swinburne and Poe, that Donne did to Spenser 
three hundred years ago. In this condition of things it 
may seem useless to found any claim for Poe on the ground 
of the exquisite mellifluousness of his versification. We 
may hope, however, some day to regain the use of our 
ears, and to discover once more that music and metre are 
utterly distinct arts. When that re-discovery has been 
made, Poe will resume his position as one of the most 
uniformly melodious of all those who have used the 
English language. 

Critics who have admitted the extraordinary perfection 
of his prosody have Occasionally objected that in the most 
popular examples of it, " The Raven" and " The Bells," 
he obtains his effect by a trick. It might be objected, 
with equal force, that Victor Hugo in " Les Djinns" and 
even Tennyson in " The Lotus Eaters' ' made use of 
" tricks." On the other hand, if the charge be deserved, 
it seems odd that in the course of nearly seventy years 
no other juggler or conjurer has contrived to repeat the 
wonderful experiment. In each poem there are what 
must be judged definite errors against taste in detail — 
Poe's taste was never very sure — but the skill of the long 
voluptuous lamentation, broken at equal intervals by the 
croak of the raven, and that of the verbal translation, as 
if into four tones or languages, of the tintinabulation of 
the bells, is so extraordinary, so original, and so closely in 
keeping with the personal genius of the writer, that it is 
surely affectation to deny its value. 

It is not, however, in " The Bells " or in " The Raven," 
marvellous as are these tours de force, that we see the 
essential greatness of Poe revealed. The best of his 
poems are those in which he deals less boisterously with 
the sentiment of mystery. During the latest months of 
his unhappy life, he composed three lyrics which, from a 



ii2 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



technical point of view, must be regarded not only as the 
most interesting which he wrote, but as those which have 
had the most permanent effect upon subsequent literature, 
not in England merely, but in France. These are " Ula- 
lume," " Annabel Lee," " For Annie." One of Poe's 
greatest inventions was the liquidation of stanzaic form, 
by which he was able to mould it to the movements of 
emotion without losing its essential structure. Many 
poets had done this with the line; it was left for Poe to 
do it with the stanza. In the three latest lyrics this 
stanzaic legerdemain is practised with an enchanting 
lightness, an ecstasy of sinuous and elastic grace. Per- 
haps, had it been subjected to the poet's latest revision, 
" For Annie" would have been the most wonderful of all 
in the sensitive response of its metre to the delicate fluc- 
tuations of sentiment. 

We may, then, briefly summarise that Poe's first claim 
to commemoration is that he was the pioneer in restoring 
to the art of poetry a faculty which it had almost lost in 
its attempt to compete with science and philosophy. It 
had become the aim of the poets to state facts; it was 
given to Poe to perceive that no less splendid a future lay 
before those who only hinted feelings. He was the earliest 
modern poet who substituted the symbol for the exact 
description of an object or an event. That " expression 
directe," about which the French have been debating for 
the last quarter of a century, and over which M. Adolphe 
Rette and M. Albert Mockel periodically dispute like 
Fathers of the Church, was perceived and was deliberately 
repudiated by Poe eighty years ago. He was deeply 
impregnated with the sense that the harmony of imagi- 
nation is not destroyed, but developed, by drawing over 
a subject veil after veil of suggestion. His native tem- 
perament aided him in his research after the symbol. He 
was naturally a cultivator of terror, one who loved to 



The Centenary of Edgar Allan Poe 1 1 3 



people the world with strange and indefinable powers. 
His dreams were innocent and agitating, occupied with 
supernatural terrors, weighed upon by the imminence of 
shadowy presentments. He trembled at he knew not 
what; in this he was related to the earliest poets of the 
world, and in his perpetual recurrence to symbol he recalls 
the action of their alarms. 

The cardinal importance, then, of Poe as a poet is that 
he restored to poetry a primitive faculty of which civilisa- 
tion seemed successfully to have deprived her. He rejected 
the doctrinal expression of positive things, and he insisted 
upon mystery and symbol. He endeavoured to clothe 
unfathomable thoughts and shadowy images in melody 
that was like the wind wandering over the strings of an 
aeolian harp. In other words, he was the pioneer of a 
school which has spread its influence to the confines of 
the civilised world, and is now revolutionising literature. 
He was the discoverer and the founder of Symbolism. 

1909. 



1 



I 



\ 



THE AUTHOR OF « PELHAM 



\ 



THE AUTHOR OF " PELHAM " 



One hundred and twenty years have nearly passed since 
the birth of Bulwer-Lytton, and he continues to be sus- 
pended in a dim and ambiguous position in the history 
of our literature. He combined extraordinary qualities with 
fatal defects. He aimed at the highest eminence, and 
failed to reach it, but he was like an explorer, who is diverted 
from the main ascent of a mountain, and yet annexes 
an important table-land elsewhere. Bulwer-Lytton never 
secured the ungrudging praise of the best judges, but he 
attained great popularity, and has even now not wholly 
lost it. He is never quoted as one of our great writers, 
and yet he holds a place of his own from which it is improb- 
able that he will ever be dislodged. Although he stood out 
prominently among his fellows, and although his career 
was tinged with scandal and even with romance, very little 
has been known about him. Curiosity has been foiled by 
the discretion of one party and the malignity of another. 
The public has not been in a position to know the truth, 
nor to possess the real portrait of a politician and a man of 
letters who has been presented as an angel and as a gargoyle, 
but never as a human being. Forty years after his death 
the candour and the skill of his grandson reveal him to us 
at last in a memoir of unusual excellence. 

In no case would Lord Lytton's task have been an easy 
one, but it must have been made peculiarly difficult by the 
work of those who had preceded him. Of these the only 
one who deserves serious attention is Robert Lytton, who 
published certain fragments in 1883. That the son wished 

117 



1 1 8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



to support the memory of his father is unquestionable. 
But it is difficult to believe that he intended his contribu- 
tion to be more than an aid to some future biographer's 
labour. He scattered his material about him in rough 
heaps. Apart from the " Literary Remains," which 
destroyed the continuity of even such brief biography as 
he gave, Robert Lytton introduced a number of chapters 
which are more or less of the nature of essays, and are 
often quite foreign to his theme. Moreover, he dedicated 
several chapters to literary criticism of his father's works. 
It is, in fact, obvious to any one who examines the two 
volumes of 1883 which Robert Lytton contrived to fill, that 
he was careful to contribute as little as he possibly could 
to the story which he had started out to relate. Although 
there is much that is interesting in the memoirs of 1883, 
the reader is continually losing the thread of the narrative. 
The reason is, no doubt, that Robert Lytton stood too 
close to his parents, had seen too much of their disputes, 
was too much torn by the agonies of his own stormy youth, 
and was too sensitively conscious of the scandal, to tell 
the story at all. We have the impression that, in order 
to forestall any other biography, he pretended himself 
to write a book which he was subtle enough to make 
unintelligible. 

This baffling discretion, this feverish race from hiding- 
place to hiding-place, has not only not been repeated by 
Lord Lytton in the new Life, but the example of his 
father seems to have positively emphasised his own 
determination to be straightforward and lucid. I know no 
modern biography in which the writer has kept more 
rigidly to the business of his narrative, or has less success- 
fully been decoyed aside by the sirens of family vanity. 
It must have been a great difficulty to the biographer to 
find his pathway cumbered by the volumes of 1883, set by 
his father as a plausible man-trap for future intruders. 



The Author of c Pelham ' 119 



Lord Lytton, however, is the one person who is not an 
intruder, and he was the only possessor of the key which 
his father had so diplomatically hidden. His task, however, 
was further complicated by the circumstance that Bulwer- 
Lytton himself left in MS. an autobiography, dealing very 
fully with his own career and character up to the age of 
twenty-two. The redundancy of all the Lyttons is amaz- 
ing. Bulwer-Lytton would not have been himself if he 
had not overflowed into reflections which swelled his 
valuable account of his childhood into monstrous propor- 
tions. Lord Lytton, who has a pretty humour, tells an 
anecdote which will be read with pleasure : — 

" An old woman, who had once been one of Bulwer- 
Lytton' s trusted domestic servants, is still living in a cottage 
at Knebworth. One day she was talking to me about my 
grandfather, and inadvertently used an expression which 
summed him up more perfectly than any elaborate descrip- 
tion could have done. She was describing his house at 
Copped Hall, where she had been employed as caretaker, 
and added : ' In one of his attacks of -fluency, I nursed him 
there for many weeks/ ' Pleurisy/ I believe, was what 
she meant." 

The bacillus of " fluency " interpenetrates the Auto- 
biography, the letters, the documents of every kind, and 
at any moment this disease will darken Bulwer-Lytton' s 
brightest hours. But curtailed by his grandson, and with 
its floral and heraldic ornaments well pared away, the 
Autobiography is a document of considerable value. It 
is written with deliberate candour, and recalls the manner 
of Cobbett, a writer with whom we should not expect to 
find Bulwer-Lytton in sympathy. It is probable that the 
author of it never saw himself nor those who surrounded 
him in precisely their true relation. There was something 



1 20 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



radically twisted in his image of life, which always seems 
to have passed through a refracting surface on its way to 
his vision. No doubt this is more or less true of all experi- 
ence; no power has given us the gift " to see ourselves 
as others see us." But in the case of Bulwer-Lytton this 
refractive habit of his imagination produced a greater 
swerving aside from positive truth than is usual. The 
result is that an air of the fabulous, of the incredible, is 
given to his narratives, and often most unfairly. 

A close examination, in fact, of the Autobiography 
results in confirming the historic truth of it. What is 
surprising is not, when we come to consider them, the 
incidents themselves, but Bulwer-Lytton' s odd way of 
narrating them. Lord Lytton, without any comment, 
provides us with curious material for the verification of his 
grandfather's narrative. He prints, here and there, letters 
from entirely prosaic persons which tally, often to a surpris- 
ing degree, with the extravagant statements of Bulwer- 
Lytton. To quote a single instance, of a very remarkable 
character, Bulwer-Lytton describes the effect his scholar- 
ship produced, at the age of seventeen, upon sober, elderly 
people, who were dazzled with his accomplishments and 
regarded him as a youthful prodigy. It is the sort of 
confession, rather full-blooded and lyrical, which we might 
easily set down to that phenomenon of refraction. But 
Lord Lytton prints a letter from Dr. Samuel Parr (whom, 
by the way, he calls " a man of sixty-four," but Parr, born 
in 1747, was seventy-four in 182 1), which confirms the 
autobiographer's account in every particular. The aged 
Whig churchman, who boasted a wider knowledge of Greek 
literature than any other scholar of his day, and whose 
peremptory temper was matter of legend, could write to 
this Tory boy a long letter of enthusiastic criticism, and 
while assuring Bulwer-Lytton that he kept " all the letters 
with which you have honoured me," could add : " I am 



The Author of ' Pelham ' 121 



proud of such a correspondent ; and, if we lived nearer to 
each other, I should expect to be very happy indeed in 
such a friend." Letters of this kind, judiciously printed 
by Lord Lytton in his notes, serve to call us back from the 
nebulous witchcraft in which Bulwer-Lytton was so fond 
of wrapping up the truth, and to remind us that, in spite 
of the necromancer, the truth is there. 

From the point where the fragment of autobiography 
closes, although for some time much the same material is 
used and some of the same letters are quoted, as were 
quoted and used by Robert Lytton, the presentation of 
these is so different that the whole effect is practically one 
of novelty. But with the year 1826, when Edward Bulwer- 
Lytton, at the age of three-and-twenty, became engaged 
to Rosina Doyle Wheeler, all is positively new. The story 
of the marriage, separation, and subsequent relations has 
never before been presented to the world with any approach 
to accuracy or fulness. No biographical notices of Bulwer- 
Lytton even touch on this subject, which has been hitherto 
abandoned to the gossip of irresponsible contemporaries.. 
It is true that a Miss Devey composed a " Life of Rosina, 
Lady Lytton," in which the tale was told. This work was 
immediately suppressed, and is inaccessible to the public; 
but the only person who is known to be familiar with its 
contents reports that it " contains fragments of the narra- 
tive, obviously biassed, wholly inaccurate, and evidently 
misleading." So far as the general public is concerned, 
Lord Lytton' s impartial history of the relations between his 
grandfather and his grandmother is doubtless that portion 
of his book which will be regarded as the most important. 
I may, therefore, dwell briefly upon his treatment of it. 

The biographer, in dealing with a subject of this incalcu- 
lable difficulty, could but lay himself open to the censure 
of those who dislike the revelation of the truth on any dis- 
agreeable subject. This lion, however, stood in the middle 



122 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



of his path, and he had either to wrestle with it or to turn 
back. Lord Lytton says in his preface that it was neces- 
sary to tell all or nothing of the matrimonial adventures 
of his grandparents, but, in reality, this was not quite the 
alternative, which was to tell the truth or to withdraw 
from the task of writing a Life of Bulwer-Lytton. The 
marriage and its results were so predominant in the career 
of the man, and poisoned it so deeply to the latest hour 
of his consciousness, that to attempt a biography of him 
without clear reference to them would have been like 
telling the story of Nessus the Centaur without mentioning 
the poisoned arrow of Heracles. But Lord Lytton shall 
give his own apology : — 

u As it was impossible to give a true picture of my grand- 
father without referring to events, which overshadowed 
his whole life, and which were already partially known to 
the public, I decided to tell the whole story as fully and as 
accurately as possible, in the firm belief that the truth 
can damage neither the dead nor the living. The steps 
which led to the final separation between my grandparents, 
and the forces which brought about so disastrous a con- 
clusion of a marriage of love, apart from their biographical 
interest, afford a study of human nature of the utmost 
value ; and so great are the moral lessons which this story 
contains, that 1 venture to hope that the public may find 
in much that is tragic and pitiful much also that is redeem- 
ing, and that the ultimate verdict of posterity may be that 
these two unfortunate people did not suffer entirely in 
vain." 

His story, therefore, is not written with any partiality, 
and it seems to be as full and as truthful as the ample 
materials at the author's disposal permitted. The reader 
will conjecture that Lord Lytton could have given many 



The Author of c Pelham ' 123 



more details, but apart from the fact that they would often 
have been wholly unfit for publication, it is difficult to see 
that they would in any degree have altered the balance of 
the story, or modified our judgment, which is auite suffi- 
ciently enlightened by the copious letters on ftoth sides 
which are now for the first time printed. 

Voltaire has remarked of love that it is " de toutes les 
passions la plus forte, parce qu'elle attaque, a la fois, la 
tete, le coeur, le corps." It is a commonplace to say that 
Edward Bulwer's whole career might have been altered if 
he had never met Rosina Wheeler, because this is true in 
measure of every strong juvenile Attachment : but it is 
rarely indeed so copiously or so fatally true as it was in 
his case. His existence was overwhelmed by this event; 
it was turned topsy-turvey, and it never regained its 
equilibrium. In this adventure all was exaggerated ; there 
was excess of desire, excess of gratification, an intense 
weariness, a consuming hatred. 

On the first evening when the lovers met, in April 1826, 
an observer, watching them as they talked, reflected that 
Bulwer's " bearing had that aristocratic something border- 
ing on hauteur' 1 which reminded the onlooker "of the 
passage, 'Stand back; I am holier than thou!'" The 
same observer, dazzled, like the rest of the world, by the 
loveliness of Miss Wheeler, judged that it would be best 
" to regard her as we do some beautiful caged wild creature 
of the woods — at a safe and secure distance." It would 
have preserved a chance of happiness for Bulwer-Lytton 
to possess something of this stranger's clairvoyance. It 
was not strange perhaps, but unfortunate, that he did not 
notice — or rather that he was not repelled by, for he did 
notice — the absence of moral delicacy in the beautiful 
creature, the radiant and seductive Lamia, who responded 
so instantly to his emotion. He, the most fastidious of 
men, was not offended by the vivacity of a young lady 



124 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



who called attention to the vulgarity of her father's worsted 
stockings and had none but words of abuse for her mother. 
These things, indeed, disconcerted the young aristocrat, 
but he put them down to a lack of training ; he persuaded 
himself that these were superficial blemishes and could 
be remedied ; and he resigned his senses to the intoxication 
of Rosina' s beauty. 

At first — and indeed to the last — she stimulated his 
energy and his intellect. His love and his hatred alike 
spurred him to action. In August 1826, in spite of the 
violent opposition of his mother, he and Rosina were 
betrothed. By October Mrs. Bulwer had so far prevailed 
that the engagement was broken off, and Edward tossed 
in a whirlpool of anger, love, and despair. It took the 
form of such an attack of " fluency " as was never seen 
before or after. Up to that time he had been an elegant 
although feverish idler. Now he plunged into a strenuous 
life of public and private engagements. He prepared to 
enter the House of Commons; he finished Falkland, his 
first novel; he started the composition of Pelham and of 
another " light prose work," which may have disappeared; 
he achieved a long narrative in verse, O'Neill, or the Rebel; 
and he involved himself in literary projects without bound 
and without end. The aim of all this energy was money. 
It is true that he had broken off his betrothal ; but it was 
at first only a pretence at estrangement, to hoodwink his 
mother. He was convinced that he could not live without 
possessing Rosina, and as his mother held the strings of 
the common purse, he would earn his own income and 
support a wife. 

Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, who had a Roman firmness, was 
absolutely determined that her son should not marry " a 
penniless girl whose education had been so flagrantly 
neglected, who was vain and flighty, with a mocking humour 
and a conspicuous lack of principle/ ' At this point the 



The Author of 'Pelham' 125 



story becomes exceedingly interesting. A Balzac would 
strip it of its romantic trappings, and would penetrate into 
its physiology. Out of Rosina' s sight, and diverted by 
the excess of his literary labours, Edward's infatuation 
began to decline. His fhother, whose power of character 
would have been really formidable if it had been enforced 
by sympathy or even by tact, relaxed her opposition ; and 
instantly her son, himself, no longer attacked, became calmer 
and more clear-sighted. Rosina' s faults were patent to his 
memory ; the magic of her beauty less invincible. Within 
a month all was changed again. Rosina fretted herself 
into what she contrived to have reported to Bulwer-Lytton 
as an illness. She begged for an interview, and he went 
with reluctance to bid her farewell for ever. It was Bulwer- 
Lytton' s habit to take with him a masterpiece of literature 
upon every journey. It seems unfortunate that on this 
occasion The Tempest was not his companion, for it might 
have warned him, as Prospero warned Ferdinand, against 
the fever in the blood : — 

" No sweet aspersion shall the heavens let fall 
To make this contract grow ; but barren hate, 
Sour-eyed disdain, and discord, shall bestrew 
The union of your bed, with weeds so loathly 
That you shall hate it, both/' 

When his short interview, which was to have been a final 
one, was over, that had happened which made a speedy 
marriage necessary, whatever the consequences might be. 

The new conditions were clearly stated to old Mrs. 
Bulwer-Lytton, but that formidable lady belonged to an 
earlier generation, and saw no reason for Quixotic behaviour. 
Her conscience had been trained in the eighteenth century, 
and all her blame was for Rosina Wheeler. Torn between 
his duty and his filial affection, Bulwer-Lytton now passed 
through a period of moral agony. He wrote to his mother : 
" I am far too wretched, and have had too severe a contest 



126 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



with myself, not to look to the future rather with despond- 
ency than pleasure, and the view you take of the matter 
is quite enough to embitter my peace of mind." Miss 
Wheeler, not unnaturally stung to anger, used disrespect- 
ful expressions regarding Mrs. Bulwer-Lytton, and these 
bickerings filled the lover and son with indignation. His 
life, between these ladies, grew to be hardly worth living, 
and in the midst of one such crisis this brilliant young 
dandy of four-and-twenty wrote : — " I feel more broken- 
hearted, despondent, and sated than any old valetudi- 
narian who has seen all his old hopes and friends drop off 
one by one, and finds himself left for the rest of his existence 
to the solitary possession of gloom and gout." Mrs. 
Bulwer-Lytton fought fiercely to the last, and Edward 
determined to close the matter; on August 29th, 1827, 
he married Rosina. 

At first, in spite of, and even because of, the wild hostility 
of his mother, the marriage seemed successful. The rage 
of the mother drove the husband to the wife. Lord Lytton 
has noted that in later years all that his grandfather and 
his grandmother said about one another was unconsciously 
biassed by their memory of later complications. Neither 
Bulwer-Lytton nor Rosina could give an accurate history 
of their relations at the beginning, because the mind of 
each was prejudiced by their knowledge of the end. Each 
sought to justify the hatred which both had lived to feel, 
by representing the other as hateful from the first. But 
the letters survive, and the recollections of friends, to 
prove that this was entirely untrue. It must be admitted 
that their union was never based upon esteem, but wholly 
upon passion, and that from the first they lacked that 
coherency of relation, in moral respects, which was needed 
to fix their affections. But those who have dimly heard 
how bitterly these two unfortunate people hated one 
another in later life will be astonished to learn that 



The Author of ' Pelham ■ 127 



they spent the two first years together like infatuated 
turtle-doves. 

Their existence was romantic and absurd. Cut off from 
all support by the implacable anger of old Mrs. Bulwer- 
Lytton, they depended on a combined income of £380 a 
year and whatever the husband could make to increase it. 
Accordingly they took a huge country house, Woodcot in 
Oxon, and lived at the rate of several thousands a year. 
There they basked in an affluent splendour of bad taste 
which reminds us of nothing in the world so much as of 
those portions of The Lady Flabetta which Mrs. Wititterly 
was presently to find so soft and so voluptuous. The 
following extract from one of Rosina's lively letters — and 
she was a very sprightly correspondent — gives an example 
of her style, of her husband's Pelhamish extravagance, 
and of the gaudy recklessness of their manner of life. They 
had now been married nearly two years : — 

" How do you think my audacious husband has spent 
his time since he has been in town ? Why, he must needs 
send me down what he termed a little Christmas box, which 
was a huge box from Howel and James's, containing only 
eight Gros de Naples dresses of different colours not made 
up, four Gros des Indes, two merino ones, four satin ones, 
an amber, a black, a white and a blue, eight pocket hand- 
kerchiefs that look as if they had been spun out of lilies 
and air and brodee by the fairies, they are so exquisitely 
fine and so beautifully worked. Four pieces (16 yards in 
each) of beautiful white blonde, two broad pieces and two 
less broad, a beautiful and very large blue real cashmere 
shawl, a Chantilly veil that would reach from this to Dublin, 
and six French long pellerines very richly embroidered on 
the finest India muslin, three dozen pair of white silk 
stockings, one dozen of black, a most beautiful black satin 
cloak with very pretty odd sort of capes and trimmed round 




128 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



and up the sides with a very broad band of a new kind of 
figured plush — I forget what they call it (it came from 
Paris), and a hat of the same — such a hat as can only be 
made in the Rue Vivienne. You would think that this 
' little Christmas box 1 would have been enough to have 
lasted for some time. However, he thought differently, 
for on New Year's morning before I was out of bed, there 
came a parcel by the mail, which on opening proved to be 
a large red Morocco case containing a bright gold chain, a 
yard and a half long, with the most beautiful and curious 
cross to it that I ever saw — the chain is as thick as my 
dead gold necklace, and you may guess what sort of a 
thing it is when I tell you that I took it to a jeweller here 
to have it weighed, and it weighed a pound all but an 
ounce. The man said it never was made for less than fifty 
guineas, but that he should think it had cost more." 

Rosina, who has only £8o a year of her own, will not be 
outdone, and cannot " resist ordering " Edward " a gold 
toilette, which he has long wished for. . . . Round the 
rim of the basin and the handle of the ewer I have ordered 
a wreath of narcissus in dead gold, which, for Mr. Pelham, 
you'll own, is not a bad idea." 

It would be expected that all this crazy display would 
lead the young couple rapidly and deeply into debt. That 
it did not do so is the most curious phase of the story. 
Bulwer-Lytton immediately, and apparently without the 
slightest difficulty, developed a literary industry the sober 
record of which approaches the fabulous. Walter Scott 
alone may be held to have equalled it. The giants of 
popular fiction did, indeed, enjoy larger single successes 
than Bulwer-Lytton did, but none of them, not Dickens 
himself, was so uniformly successful. Everything he wrote 
sold as though it were bread displayed to a hungry crowd. 
Even his poetry, so laboriously and lifelessly second-hand, 



The Author of ' Pelham ' 129 



always sold. He did not know what failure was ; he made 
money by Devereux; even The New Timon went into many 
editions. To earn what was required, however — and in 
these early years he seems to have made £3000 his minimum 
of needful return — to live in the insane style which his wife 
and he demanded, an enormous nervous strain was required. 
Edward Bulwer-Lytton's temper had always been warm 
and eager; it now grew irritable to the highest degree. 
His mother continued to exasperate him ; his wife suddenly 
failed to please him; his health waned; and he became 
the most miserable of men; yet without ceasing for a 
moment to be the most indefatigable of authors. The 
reader will follow the evolution of the tragedy, which is of 
poignant interest, in Lord Lytton's pages. The whole 
story is one of the most extraordinary in the history of 
literature. 

It has been a feature of Bulwer-Lytton's curious post- 
humous fortune that he has seemed solitary in his intellec- 
tual if not in his political and social action. We think of 
him as one of those morose and lonely bees that are too 
busy gathering pollen to join the senate of the hive, and 
are dwellers in the holes of the rocks. It is quite true that, 
with a painful craving for affection, he had not the genius 
of friendship. The general impression given by his 
biography is one of isolation ; in " the sea of life " he was 
one of those who are most hopelessly " enisled." Nothing 
is sadder than this severance of a delicate and sensitive 
temperament from those who surround it closely and to 
whom it stretches out its arms in vain. But a careful 
reading of these interesting volumes leaves us in no doubt 
of the cause of this loneliness. Bulwer-Lytton, with all 
his ardour and his generosity, was devoid of the gift of 
sympathy. In characters of a simpler mould a natural 
kindliness may take the place of comprehension. But 

Bulwer-Lytton had a lively and protean fancy which 
K 



130 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



perpetually deceived him. In human relations he was 
always moving, but always on the wrong track. 

The letters to his mother, to his wife, to his son, exemplify 
this unfortunate tendency. They are eloquent, they are 
even too eloquent, for Bulwer-Lytton intoxicated himself 
with his own verbosity; they are meant to be kind, they i 
are meant to be just, they are meant to be wise and digni- U 
fied and tender; but we see, in Lord Lytton's impartial ^ 
narrative, that they scarcely ever failed to exasperate the 
receiver. His dealings with his son, of whom he was ] 
exquisitely proud and sensitively fond, are of the saddest J 
character, because of the father's want of comprehension, J 
haste of speech and intolerance of temper. The very fact I 
that a son, a wife, or a mother could with impunity be 
addressed in terms of exaggerated sensibility, because there 1 
could be no appeal, was a snare to the too-ready pen of 
Bulwer-Lytton, which poured out its oceans of ink without 
reflection and without apprehension. If violent offence 
were given, the post went out again later in the day, and 
equally violent self-humiliation would restore the emotional I 
balance. But what could not be restored was the sense of 
confidence and domestic security. 

In his contact with other literary men of his own age 
more restraint was necessary, and we learn from Lord 
Lytton's pages of valuable and prolonged acquaintanceships 
which were sometimes almost friendships. His company 
was much sought after, and occasionally by very odd 
persons. Lord Lytton prints a series of most diverting 
letters from the notorious Harriette Wilson, who, in spite 
of the terror into which her " Memoirs " had thrown society, 
desired to add the author of Pelham to the aviary of her 
conquests. But the snare was set in vain before the eyes 
of so shrewd a bird as Bulwer-Lytton; he declined to 
see the lady, but he kept her amazing letters. This was 
in 1829, when the novelist seems to have had no literary 



The Author of < Pelham ■ 131 



or political associates. But by 1831, we find him editing 
the New Monthly Magazine, and attaching himself to Lord 
Melbourne and Lord Durham on the one hand and to 
Disraeli and Dickens on the other. When to these we have 
added Lady Blessington and Letitia Landon, we have 
mentioned all those public persons with whom Bulwer- 
Lytton seems to have been on terms of intimacy during 
his early manhood. All through these years he was an 
incessant diner-out and party-goer, and the object of 
marvellous adulation, but he passed through all this social 
parade as though it had been a necessary portion of the 
exterior etiquette of life. Why he fatigued himself by 
these formal exercises, in which he seems to have found 
no pleasure, it is impossible to conceive, but a sense of the 
necessity of parade was strangely native to him. 

He had, however, one close and constant friend. John 
Forster was by far the most intimate of all his associates 
throughout his career. Bulwer-Lytton seems to have met 
him first about 1834, when he was twenty-eight and Forster 
only twenty-two. In spite of this disparity in age, the 
younger man almost at once took a tone of authority such 
as the elder seldom permitted in an acquaintance. Forster 
had all the gifts which make a friend valuable. He was 
rich in sympathy and resource, his temper was reasonable, 
he comprehended a situation, he knew how to hold his own 
in argument and yet yield with grace. Lord Lytton prints 
a very interesting character-sketch of Forster, which he 
has found among his grandfather's MSS. It is a tribute 
which does equal credit to him who makes it and to him 
of whom it is made : — 

" John Forster ... A most sterling man, with an intel- 
lect at once massive and delicate. Few, indeed, have his 
strong practical sense and sound judgment; fewer still 
unite with such qualities his exquisite appreciation of laten 



132 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



beauties in literary art. Hence, in ordinary life, there is 
no safer adviser about literary work, especially poetry ; no 
more refined critic. A large heart naturally accompanies 
so masculine an understanding. He has the rare capacity 
for affection which embraces many friendships without 
loss of depth or warmth in one. Most of my literary 
contemporaries are his intimate companions, and their 
jealousies of each other do not diminish their trust in him. 
More than any living critic, he has served to establish 
reputations. Tennyson and Browning owed him much in 
their literary career. Me, I think, he served in that way 
less than any of his other friends. But, indeed, I know 
of no critic to whom I have been much indebted for any 
position I hold in literature. In more private matters I 
am greatly indebted to his counsels. His reading is exten- 
sive. What faults he has lie on the surface. He is some- 
times bluff to rudeness. But all such faults of manner 
(and they are his only ones) are but trifling inequalities in 
a nature solid and valuable as a block of gold." 

This was written with full experience, as the names of 
Tennyson and Browning will remind us, for Bulwer-Lytton 
was slow to admit the value of these younger talents. His 
relations with Tennyson have always been known to be 
unfortunate; as they are revealed in Lord Lytton's 
biography they approach the incredible. He met Brown- 
ing at Covent Garden Theatre during the Macready " re- 
vival' ' of the poetic stage, but it was not until after the 
publication of Men and Women that he became conscious 
of Browning's claim, which he then very grudgingly ad- 
mitted. He was grateful to Browning for his kindness to 
Robert Lytton in Italy, but he never understood his genius 
or his character. 

What, however, we read with no less pleasure than 
surprise are the evidences of Bulwer-Lytton' s interest in 



The Author of 'Pelham' 133 



certain authors of a later generation, of whom the general 
public has never suspected him to have been aware. Some- 
thing almost like friendship sprang up as lately as 1867 
between him and a man whom nobody would suppose him 
to admire, Matthew Arnold. It sometimes happens that 
a sensitive and petulant artist finds it more easy to acknow- 
ledge the merits of his successors than to endure those of 
his immediate contemporaries. The Essays in Criticism 
and The Study of Celtic Literature called forth from the 
author of My Novel and The Caxtons such eulogy as had 
never been spared for the writings of Thackeray or Carlyle. 
Matthew Arnold appeared to Bulwer-Lytton to have 
" brought together all that is most modern in sentiment, 
with all that is most scholastic in thought and language/ ' 
Arnold was a guest at Knebworth, and brought the Duke 
of Genoa with him. He liked Bulwer-Lytton, and their 
relations became very cordial and lasted for some years; 
Arnold has given an amusing, but very sympathetic, account 
of the dignified hospitalities of Knebworth. 

No revelation in Lord Lytton's volumes is, however, 
more pleasing or more unexpected than his grandfather's 
correspondence with Swinburne. It is thought that he 
heard of him through Monckton Milnes; at all events, 
he was an early reader of Atalanta in Calydon. When, in 
1866, all the furies of the Press fell shrieking on Poems and 
Ballads, Bulwer-Lytton took a very generous step. He 
wrote to Swinburne, expressing his sympathy and begging 
him to be calm. The young poet was extremely touched, 
and took occasion to beg the elder writer for his advice, the 
publisher having, without consulting him, withdrawn his 
volume from sale. Bulwer-Lytton' s reply was a most 
cordial invitation to stay with him at Knebworth and talk 
the matter over. Swinburne gratefully accepted, and John 
Forster was asked to meet him. It was Bulwer-Lytton, it 
appears, who found another publisher for the outraged 



134 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



volume, and helped Swinburne out of the scrape. He was 
always kindness itself if an appeal was made to his protec- 
tion, and to his sense of justice. However, pleasant as the 
visit to Knebworth was, there is no evidence that it was 
repeated. Bulwer-Lytton considered Swinburne's opinions 
preposterous, and indeed if he told Swinburne, as in 1869 
he told his son Robert, that Victor Hugo was " but an 
epileptic dwarf in a state of galvanism," there must have 
been wigs on the green at Knebworth. 

The student of the biography, if he is already familiar 
with the more characteristic works of Bulwer-Lytton, will 
find himself for the first time provided with a key to much 
that has puzzled him in the nature of that author. The 
story itself, apart from the tragic matrimonial trouble which 
runs through it like a blood-red cord, is of unusual interest. 
It is a story of strife, without repose, without enjoyment, 
but with a good deal of splendour and satisfaction. Almost 
to the end Bulwer-Lytton was engaged in struggle. As an 
ambitious social being he was fighting the world; as an 
author he was battling with his critics ; as a statesman he 
was always in the wild storm of party politics. As a private 
individual he was all the time keeping his head up against 
the tide of social scandal which attacked him when he least 
expected it, and often threatened to drown him altogether. 
This turmoil contrasts with the calm of the evening years, 
after the peerage had been won, the ambition satisfied, 
the literary reputation secured. 

Few writers have encountered, in their own time and 
after their death, so much adverse criticism, and yet have 
partly survived it. It is hardly realised, even perhaps by 
Lord Lytton, how unwilling the reviewers were to give 
credit to his grandfather. He never found favour in their 
eyes, and it was a matter of constant resentment with 
him that they did him, as he thought, injustice. The 
evidence of his wounded feelings is constant in his letters. 



The Author of < Pelham ' 135 



The Quarterly Review never mentioned him without con- 
tempt until 1865, when the publication of his works, in 
forty-three volumes, forced it to consider this indefatigable 
and popular writer with a measure of respect. Sir Walter 
Scott, with his universal geniality, read Pelham in 1828 and 
" found it very interesting : the light is easy and gentle- 
manlike, the dark very grand and sombrous." He asked 
who was the author, and he tried to interest his son-in-law 
in the novel. But Lockhart was implacable : " Pelham ," 
he replied, " is writ by a Mr. Bulwer, a Norfolk squire, and 
horrid puppy. I have not read the book, from disliking 
the author." Lockhart, however, did read Devereux, and 
three years afterwards, when reviewing some other novel, 
he said of the historical characters in that romance : "It 
seems hard to disquiet so many bright spirits for the sole 
purpose of showing that they could be dull." That was the 
attitude of the higher criticism to Bulwer-Lytton from, let 
us say, 1830 to i860; he was " a horrid puppy" and he 
was also " dull." 

But this was far from being the opinion of the reading 
public. We have seen that he never failed, and sometimes 
he soared into the very empyrean of popularity. In 1834, 
when he published The Last Days of Pompeii, again in 1837 
when he published Ernest Maltr avers, the ecstasy of his 
adorers discovered their favourite in a moment under the 
mask of anonymity which he chose to assume. This was just 
before the outburst of the great school of Victorian novel- 
ists ; Bulwer had as yet practically no one but Disraeli to 
compete with. These two, the author of Pelham and the 
author of Vivian Grey, raced neck and neck at the head of 
the vast horde of " fashionable " novel-writers, now all but 
them forgotten. In Bulwer-Lytton' s romances the reader 
moved among exalted personages, alternately flippant and 
sinister; a "mournful enthusiasm" was claimed for the 
writer by the readers of his day. It was the latest and most 



136 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



powerful development of that Byronic spirit which had 
been so shortlived in verse, but which was to survive in 
prose until Bulwer-Lytton adopted his Caxtons manner in 
the middle of the century. As always in Byronic periods, 
the portrait of the author himself was searched for among 
his most fatal conceptions. To the young library sub- 
scriber the stoical, solitary figure of Mordaunt, in The 
Disowned, was exactly what was wanted as a representa- 
tion of the mysterious novelist himself. Pelham was the 
apotheosis of the man of fashion, and it is amusing to read 
how, when the Bulwer-Lyttons travelled, they were gazed 
at in reverence as the Pelham and the Pelhamess. 

It would be difficult to improve upon the language used 
so early as 1832 by one of the very few critics who attempted 
to do justice to Bulwer-Lytton' s merits. The Edinburgh 
Review found in him " a style vigorous and pliable, some- 
times strangely incorrect, but often rising into a touching 
eloquence/' Ten years later such was the private opinion 
of D. G. Rossetti, who was " inspired by reading Rienzi 
and Ernest Maltravers, which is indeed a splendid work." 
Now that we look back at Bulwer-Lytton' s prodigious com- 
positions, we are able to perceive more justly than did the 
critics of his own day what his merits were. For one thing, 
he was extraordinarily versatile. If we examine his books, 
we must be astonished at their variety. He painted the 
social life of his own day, he dived into spectral romance, 
he revived the beautiful ceremonies of antiquity, he evoked 
the great shades of English and of Continental history, he 
made realistic and humorous studies of middle-class life, 
he engaged in vehement controversy on topics of the hour, 
he prophesied of the order of the future, he wrote comedies 
and tragedies, epics and epistles, satires and lyrics. His 
canvasses were myriad and he crowded every one of them 
with figures. At his most Byronic moment he flung his 
dark cloak aside, and danced in motley through Paul 



The Author of ' Pelham 9 1 37 



Clifford, with its outrageous caricature of George IV. and 
his Ministers as a gang of Hounslow highwaymen. Perhaps 
his best claim to regard is the insatiability of his human 
curiosity, evinced in the almost infinite variety of his 
compositions. 

The singular being who wrote so large a library of works 
and whose actual features have so carefully been concealed 
from the public, will be known at last. The piety of his 
grandson has presented him to us with no reservations and 
no false lights. Here he stands, this half -fabulous being, 
not sheathed in sham armour and padding the stage in 
buskins, but a real personality at length, " with all his 
weaknesses and faults, his prejudices, affectations, vanities, 
susceptibilities, and eccentricities, and also with all his 
great qualities of industry, courage, kindness of heart; 
sound judgment, patience, and perseverance.' ' Lord 
Lytton has carried through to the close a biographical 
enterprise of unusual difficulty, and he deserves the thanks 
of all students of English literature. 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
BRONTES 



THE CHALLENGE OF THE 
BRONTES 1 

Although I possess in no degree the advantage which so 
many of the members of your society enjoy in being per- 
sonally connected with the scenes and even, perhaps, with 
the characters associated with the Bronte family, I cannot 
begin my little address to you to-day without some in- 
vocation of the genius of the place. We meet at Dewsbury 
because the immortal sisters were identified with Dews- 
bury. Is it then not imperative that for whatever picture 
of them I may endeavour to present before you this 
afternoon, Dewsbury should form the background? 
Unfortunately, however, although in the hands of a 
skilful painter the figures of the ladies may glow forth, 
I fear that in the matter of taking Dewsbury as the back- 
ground some vagueness and some darkness are inevitable. 
I In the biographies of Mrs. Gaskell and of Mr. Clement 
i Shorter, as well as in the proceedings of your society, I 
| have searched for evidences of the place Dewsbury took 
in the lives of the Brontes. What I find — I expect you 
i to tell me that it is not exhaustive — is this. Their father, 
ithe Rev. Patrick Bronte, was curate here from 1809 to 
1811. In 1836, when Charlotte was twenty, Miss Wooler 
transferred her school from Roe Head to HeakTs House 
at the top of Dewsbury Moor. In this school, where 

1 Address delivered before the Bronte Society in the Town Hall 
I of Dewsbury, March 28th, 1903. 

141 



142 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Charlotte had been a pupil since 1831, she was now a 
governess, and a governess she remained until early in 
1838. In April of that year Miss Wooler was taken ill 
and Charlotte was for a little while in charge. Then there 
was an explosion of temper, of some kind, and Charlotte 
went back to Haworth. 

That, then, in the main, is the limit of what the scru- 
pulous Muse of history vouchsafes to tell us about Charlotte 
Bronte's relation to Dewsbury. But it also supplies us 
with one or two phrases which I cannot bring myself to 
spare you. In January 1838, Charlotte reviews her 
experience at Dewsbury Moor; "I feel," she says, "in 
nothing better, nothing humbler nor purer." Again, in 
1841, after there had passed time enough to mellow her 
exacerbations, she continues to express herself with vigour. 
Miss Wooler is making overtures to Charlotte and Emily 
to take over the school at Heald's House; perhaps a place 
might be found for Anne as well. Miss Wooler, one of the 
kindest of women, is most thoughtful, most conciliatory. 
Charlotte will have none of the idea; she puts it roughly 
from her. Of Dewsbury she has nothing to say but that 
"it is a poisoned place for me." This is all we know of 
Charlotte's relation to Dewsbury, yet nothing, you will 
tell me, in Froude's phrase, to what the angels know. 
Well, I must be frank with you and say that I am afraid 
the angels have been inclined to record exceedingly little 
of Charlotte Bronte's residence in your inoffensive neigh- 
bourhood. I have to paint a background to my picture, 
and I find none but the gloomiest colours. They have to 
be what the art-critics of the eighteenth century called 
" sub-fuse." But it is not the fault of Dewsbury, it is the 
fault, or the misfortune, of our remarkable little genius. 
She was here, in this wholesome and hospitable vicinity, 
for several months, during which time " she felt in 3 
nothing better, neither humbler nor purer," and looking ? 



The Challenge of the Brontes 143 



back upon it, she had to admit that it was " a poisoned 
place " to her. 

I cannot help fancying that you will agree with me, 
that on such an occasion as the present, and especially 
when dealing with a group of writers about whom so 
much as has been said as about the Brontes, it is wise not 
to cover too wide a ground, but to take, and keep to, one 
aspect of the subject. Our little excursion into the history 
seems to have given us, under the heading " Dewsbury," 
a rather grim text, from which, nevertheless, we may 
perhaps extract some final consolation. Let me say at 
the outset that for the grimness, for the harshness, Dews- 
bury is not at all to blame. I fancy that if, in the years 
from 1836 to 1838, the Bronte girls had been visitors to 
Kubla Khan, and had been fed on honey by his myrmidons 
at Xanadu, that pleasure-dome w r ould yet have been 
" poisoned " to them. It was not poverty, and cold, and 
the disagreeable position of a governess, it was not the 
rough landscape of your moors, nor its lack of southern 
amenity which made Charlotte wretched here. It was not 
in good Miss Wooler, nor in the pupils, nor in the visitors 
at Heald's House that the mischief lay, it was in the closed 
and patient crater of Charlotte's own bosom. And I am 
almost persuaded that, if you had lived in Dewsbury 
sixty-five years ago, you would have heard on very quiet 
days a faint subterranean sound which you would never 
have been able to guess was really the passion, furiously 
panting, shut up in the heart of a small, pale governess in 
HeaJkTs House schoolroom. 

If you accuse me of fatalism, I am helpless in your 
hands, for I confess I do not see how it could be otherwise, 
and do scarcely wish that it could have been. Let us not 
be too sentimental in this matter. Figures in literature 
are notable and valuable to us for what they give us. The 
more personal and intense and definite that is, the greater 



144 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



the gift, the more strenuous the toil and the more severe 
the initiation which lead to its expression. The Brontes 
had a certain thing to leam to give; what that was we 
shall presently try to note. But whatever we find it to 
be, we start with allowing that it was extremely and boldly 
original. It was not to be mastered by lying upon padded 
sofas and toying with a little Berlin wool-work. It in- 
volved pain, resistance, a stern revision of things hitherto 
taken for granted. The secrets which they designed to 
wring from nature and from life were not likely to be 
revealed to the self-indulgent and the dilettante. The 
sisters had a message from the sphere of indignation and 
revolt. In order that they should learn it as well as teach 
it, it was necessary that they should arrive on the scene 
at an evil hour for their own happiness. Jane Eyre and 
Shirley and VUlette could not have been written unless, 
for long years, the world had been " a poisoned place " for 
Charlotte Bronte. 

It has been excellently said by Mrs. Humphry Ward 
that in many respects, and to the very last, the Brontes 
challenge no less than they attract us. This is an aspect 
which, in the midst of rapturous modem heroine-worship, 
we are apt to forget. Thackeray, who respected the 
genius of the family, and was immensely kind to the author 
of Jane Eyre, never really felt comfortable in her company. 
We know how he stole out of his own front-door, and 
slipped away into the night to escape her. "A very 
austere little person," he called her, and we may put what 
emphasis on the austerity we will. I feel sure that any 
maladroit " white-washing of Charlotte' 1 will tend, sooner 
or later, good-natured though it may be, in a failure to 
comprehend what she really was, in what her merit con- 
sisted, what the element in her w r as that, for instance, calls 
us here together nearly half a century after she completed 
her work and passed away. Young persons of genius 



The Challenge of the Brontes 145 



] very commonly write depressing books ; since, the more 
I vivid an unripe creature's impression of life is, the more 
I acute is its distress. It is only extremely stupid Sunday- 
I school children who shout in chorus, " We are so happy, 
happy, happy ! " Genius thrown naked, with exposed 
nerves, on a hard indifferent world, is never " happy " at 
first. Earth is a " poisoned place" to it, until it has won 
its way and woven its garments and discovered its food. 

But in the case of Charlotte Bronte, unhappiness was 
more than juvenile fretfulness. All her career was a revolt 
J against conventionality, against isolation, against irre- 
sistible natural forces, such as climate and ill-health and 
physical insignificance. Would this insubmissive spirit 
have passed out of her writings, as it passed, for instance, 
out of those of George Sand? I am not sure, for we see 
it as strongly, though more gracefully and skilfully ex- 
pressed, in Villette as in the early letters which her bio- 
graphers have printed. Her hatred of what was common- 
place and narrow and obvious flung her against a wall of 
prejudice, which she could not break down. She could 
only point to it by her exhausting efforts ; she could only 
invite the generation which succeeded her to bring their 
pickaxes to bear upon it. Hence, to the very last, she 
seems, more than any other figure in our literature, to be 
forever ruffled in temper, for ever angry and wounded and 
indignant, rejecting consolation, crouched like a sick animal 
in the cavern of her own quenchless pride. This is not an 
amiable attitude, nor is it historically true that this was 
Charlotte Bronte* s constant aspect. But I will venture to 
say that her amiabilities, her yielding moods, are really 
the unessential parts of her disposition, and that a certain 
admirable ferocity is the notable feature of her intellectual 
character. 

Her great heart was always bleeding. Here at Dews- 
bury, in the years we are contemplating, the hemorrhage 



146 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



was of the most doleful kind, for it was concealed, sup- 
pressed, it was an inward flow. When once she became an 
author the pain of her soul was relieved. She said, in 
1850, looking back on the publication of the hapless first 
volume of poems, " The mere effort to succeed gave a 
wonderful zest to existence." Then, a little later, when 
no one had paid the slightest attention to the slender trio 
of maiden voices, " Something like the chill of despair 
began to invade their hearts." With a less powerful 
inspiration, they must have ceased to make the effort; 
they must have succumbed in a melancholy oblivion. 
But they were saved by the instinct of a mission. It 
was not their private grief which primarily stirred them. 
What urged them on was the dim consciousness that they 
gave voice to a dumb sense of the suffering of all the world. 
They had to go on working; they had to pursue their 
course, though it might seem sinister or fatal; their busi- 
ness was to move mankind, not to indulge or please it. 
They "must be honest; they must not varnish, soften, I 
or conceal." 

Wbat Charlotte Bronte was learning to do in her grim 
and, let us admit it, her unlovely probation on Dewsbury 
Moor, was to introduce a fresh aspect of the relations of 
literature to life. Every great writer has a new note; 
hers was — defiance. All the aspects in which life pre- \ 
sented itself to her were distressing, not so much in 
themselves as in herself. She rebelled against the outrages 1 
of poverty, and she drank to its dregs the cup of straitened i 
circumstances. She was proud, as proud as Lucifer, and j 
she was forced into positions which suppleness and cheer- I 
fulness might have made tolerable, if not agreeable. She j 
wrung from these positions their last drop of bitterness. ] 
A very remarkable instance of this may be found in her j 
relation to the Sidgwick family, who, by universal report, 1 
were generous, genial, and unassuming. To Charlotte } 



The Challenge of the Brontes 147 



Bronte these kindly, if somewhat commonplace folk, grew 
to seem what a Turkish pasha seems to the inhabitants of 
a Macedonian village. It was not merely the surroundings 
of her life — it was life itself, in its general mundane arrange- 
ments, which was intolerable to her. She fretted in it, 
she beat her wings against its bars, and she would have 
done the same if those bars had been of gold, and if the 
fruits of paradise had been pushed to her between them. 
This, I think, is why the expression of her anger seems too 
often disproportionate, and why her irony is so apt to be 
preposterous. She was born to resist being caged in any 
form. Her defiance was universal, and often it was almost 
indiscriminate. 

Do not let us presume to blame this insubmission. Still 
less let us commit the folly of minimising it. A good 
cheerful little Charlotte Bronte, who thought the best of 
everybody, who gaily took her place without a grudging 
sigh, whose first aim was to make those about her happy 
and to minister to their illusions, would have been a much 
more welcome inmate of Miss Wooler's household than the 
cantankerous governess whom nobody could please, whose 
susceptibilities were always on edge, whose lonely arrogance 
made her feared by all but one or two who timidly per- 
sisted in loving her. But such a paragon of the obvious 
virtues would have passed as the birds pass and as the 
flowers. She would have left no mark behind. She 
would never have enriched the literature of England 
by one of its master- evidences of the force of human will. 
She would never have stirred hundreds of thousands of 
consciences to a wholesome questioning of fate and their 
own souls. 

Let us endeavour to pursue the inquiry a few steps 
further. It is impossible to separate the ethical conditions 
of an author's mind from the work that he produces. The 
flower requires the soil; it betrays in its colour and its 



148 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



perfume the environment of its root. The moral consti- 
tution of the writer is reflected in the influence of the 
written page. This is the incessant contention; on one 
hand the independence of art asserts itself; on the other, 
it is impossible to escape from the implicit influence of 
conduct upon art. There have been few writers of any 
age in whom this battle raged more fiercely than it did in 
Charlotte Bronte. Her books, and those of her sisters, 
seem anodyne enough to-day; to readers of a sensitive 
species they seemed, when they were published, as dangerous 
as Werther had been, as seductive as the Nouvelle Helo'ise. 
The reason of this was, in the main, the spirit of revolt 
which inspired them. There was something harsh and 
glaring in their landscape; there was that touch of Sal- 
vator Rosa which one of their earliest critics observed in 
them. But more essential was the stubbornness, the 
unflinching determination to revise all accepted formulas 
of conduct, to do this or that, not because it was usual to 
do it, but because it was rational, and in harmony with 
human nature. 

Into an age which had become almost exclusively utili- 
tarian, and in which the exercise of the imagination, in its 
real forms, was sedulously discountenanced, Charlotte 
Bronte introduced passion in the sphere of prose fiction, 
as Byron had introduced it in the sphere of verse thirty 
years earlier. It was an inestimable gift ; it had to come 
to us, from Charlotte Bronte or another, to save our litera- 
ture from a decline into triviality and pretension. Bu 
she suffered, as Byron had suffered, in the direct ratio z 
her originality. If a writer employs passion in an ag 
which has ceased to recognise it as one of the necessiti 
of literary vitality he is safe to be accused of pervertin 
his readers. Balzac says, " When nothing else can b 
charged against an author, the reproach of immorality 
thrown at his head." When we study the record of th 



The Challenge of the Brontes 149 



grim life of the sisters at Haworth, like that of three young 
soldiers round a camp-fire with the unseen enemy prowling 
in the darkness just out of their sight — when we think of 
the strenuous vigil, the intractable and indomitable per- 
sistence, the splendour of the artistic result — we may console 
ourselves in our anger at the insults they endured, by 
reflecting how little they cared. And their noble indif- 
ference to opinion further endears them to us. We may 
repeat of them all what Charlotte in a letter once said of 
Emily, " A certain harshness in her powerful and peculiar 
character only makes me cling to her more." 

This insubmissiveness, which was the unconscious 
armour given to protect her against the inevitable attacks 
of fortune, while, on the other hand, it was the very sign- 
manual of Charlotte's genius, was, on the other, a draw- 
back from which she did not live long enough to emancipate 
her nature. It is responsible for her lack of interest in 
what is delicate and complex; it excused to herself a 
narrowness of vision which we are sometimes tempted to 
find quite distressing. It is probably the cause of a fault 
that never quits her for long, a tendency to make her 
characters express themselves with a lyrical extravagance 
which sometimes comes close to the confines of rodo- 
montade. Charlotte Bronte never arrives at that mastery 
of her material which permits the writer to stand apart 
from his work, and sway the reader with successive tides 
of emotion while remaining perfectly calm himself. Nor 
is she one of those whose visible emotion is nevertheless 
fugitive, like an odour, and evaporates, leaving behind it 
works of art which betray no personal agitation. On the 
contrary, her revolt, her passion, all the violence of her 
sensibility, are present on her written page, and we cannot 
read it with serenity or with a merely captious curiosity, 
because her own eager spirit, immortal in its active 
force, seems to throb beside it. 



150 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



The aspect of Charlotte Bronte which I have tried to 
indicate to you to-day, and which I have sketched thus 
hastily and slightly against the background of her almost 
voiceless residence in Dewsbury, is far from being a com- 
plete or unique one. I offer it to you only as a single 
facet of her wonderful temperament, of the rich spectacle 
of her talent. I have ventured to propose it, because, in 
the multiplication of honours and attentions, the tendency 
to deify the human, to remove those phenomena of irregu- 
larity which are the evidence of mortal strength, grows 
irresistible, and we find ourselves, unconsciously, sub- 
stituting a waxen bust, with azure eyes and golden hair, 
for the homely features which (if we could but admit it) 
so infinitely better match the honest stories. Let us not 
busy ourselves to make excuse for our austere little genius 
of the moors. Let us be content to take her exactly as she 
was, with her rebellion and her narrowness, her angers and 
her urgencies, perceiving that she had to be this sorrowful 
offspring of a poisoned world in order to clear the wells of 
feeling for others, and to win from emancipated generations 
of free souls the gratitude which is due to a precursor. 



THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN 
DISRAELI 



THE NOVELS OF BENJAMIN 
DISRAELI 

It is not easy for a man whose sovereign ambition is 
seen to be leading him with great success in a particular 
direction to obtain due credit fdr what he accomplishes 
with less manifest success in another. There is no doubt 
that Disraeli as an author has, at all events until very 
lately, suffered from the splendour of his fame as a poli- 
tician. But he was an author long before he became a 
statesman, and it certainly is a little curious that even in 
his youth, although he was always commercially successful 
with his books, they were never, as we say, " taken seri- 
ously " by the critics. His earliest novels were largely 
bought, and produced a wide sensation, but they were 
barely accepted as contributions to literature. If we look 
back to the current criticism of those times, we find such 
a book as Dacre, a romance by the Countess of Morley, 
which is now absolutely forgotten, treated with a dignity 
and a consideration never accorded to The Young Duke 
or to Henrietta Temple. Even Disraeli's satiric squibs, in 
the manner of Lucian and Swift, which seem to us among 
the most durable ornaments of light literature in the days 
of William IV., were read and were laughed at, but were 
not critically appraised. 

So, too, at the middle period of Disraeli's literary life, 
such books as Coningsby and Tancred were looked upon 
as amusing commentaries on the progress of a strenuous 
politician, not by any means, or by any responsible 

i53 



154 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



person, as possible minor classics of our language. And 
at his third period, the ruling criticism of the hour 
was aghast at faults which now entertain us, and was 
blind to sterling merits which we are now ready to acknow- 
ledge. Shortly after his death, perhaps his most brilliant 
apologist was fain to admit that if Disraeli had been un- 
distinguished as a speaker, his novels would have been 
" as the flowers of the field, charming for the day which 
was passing over them, and then forgotten." It is only 
since the beginning of the present century that a con- 
viction has been gaining ground that some of these books 
were in themselves durable, not because they were the 
work of a man who became Prime Minister of England 
and made his sovereign Empress of India, but as much 
or as little as if they had been composed by a recluse in 
a hermitage. This impression has now become so general 
with enlightened critics that the danger seems to be that 
we should underrate certain excesses of rhetoric and the 
Corinthian mode the errors of which used to be over- 
emphasised, but should not, in a comparative survey of 
Victorian literature, be neglected as serious drawbacks 
to our perfect enjoyment of the high-spirited, eloquent, 
and ardent writings of Benjamin Disraeli. It is in this 
spirit of moderation that I now attempt a rapid sketch of 
his value as an English author. 

I 

There is, perhaps, no second example of a writer whose 
work is divided, as is that of Disraeli, into three totally 
distinct periods. Other authors, as for example, the poet 
Crabbe, and in a less marked degree Rogers, have aban- 
doned the practice of writing for a considerable number of 
years, and then have resumed it. But the case of Disraeli 
seems to be unique as that of a man who pursued the writing 
of books with great ardour during three brief and indepen- 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 155 



dent spaces of time. We have his first and pre-Parliamen- 
tarian period, which began with Vivian Grey (1826) 
and closed with Venetia (1837). We have a second 
epoch, opening with Coningsby (1844) and ending with 
Tancred (1847), during which time he was working out 
his political destiny; and we have the novels which he 
wrote after he had won the highest distinction in the 
State. Certain general characteristics are met with in 
all these three classes, but they have also differences 
which require to be noted and accounted for. It will, 
therefore, be convenient to treat them successively. 

As oblivion scatters its poppy over the prose fiction of 
the reigns of George IV. and William IV., it becomes in- 
creasingly dangerous that criticism should take the early 
" fashionable " novels of Disraeli as solitary representa- 
tions of literary satire or observation. It is true that to 
readers of to-day this class of romance is exclusively sug- 
gestive of Vivian Grey and its fellows, with perhaps 
the Pelham of Bulwer. But this was not the impres- 
sion of the original readers of these novels, who were 
amused by them, but found nothing revolutionary in 
their treatment of society. In the course of The Young 
Duke, written in 1829, Disraeli suggests an amiable 
rivalry with the romances " written by my friends Mr. 
Ward and Mr. Bulwer. ,, The latter name had only just 
risen above the horizon, but that of Plumer Ward, for- 
gotten as it now is, was one to conjure by. Ward was 
the author of Tremaine (1825) and De Vere (1827), 
two novels of the life of a modern English gentleman, 
which seems to a reader to-day to be insipid and dull 
enough. But they contained "portraits" of public 
persons, they undertook to hold the mirror up to the 
political and fashionable world of London, and they 
lashed that fastidiousness which was considered to be the 
foible of the age. 



156 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



The books of Plumer Ward, who was an accomplished 
personage in advancing years, were treated with marked 
distinction in the press, and were welcomed by critics 
who deigned to take little notice of even such books as 
Granby and Dacre. But the stories of the youthful 
Disraeli belonged to a class held in still less esteem than 
those just mentioned. They had to hold their own as 
best they might in rivalry with a huge flight of novels of 
fashionable life, all of them curiously similar in general 
treatment. Above these the romances of Plumer Ward 
rose in a sort of recognised dignity, as two peaks around 
which were crowded innumerable hillocks. It is necessary 
to recall readers of to-day, who think of Vivian Grey as 
a work of amazing novelty, to the fact that the genre 
it represents to us was one which had been lifted into 
high credit the year before by the consecrated success 
of Tretnaine, and was at that moment cultivated by a 
multitude of minor novelists. 

There was, however, a distinction, and it lay in the 
greater fund of animal spirits which Disraeli brought to 
his business. Vivian Grey was absurd, but it was fresh 
and popular, and it pleased at once. As the opening work 
of a literary career, it promised well ; the impertinent young 
gentleman dashed off to Parnassus at a gallop. It was a 
bold bid for personal distinction, which the author easily 
perceived already to be " the only passport to the society 
of the great in England." Vivian Grey is little more 
than a spirited and daring boy's book; Disraeli himself 
called it " a hot and hurried sketch.' ' It was a sketch of 
what he had never seen, yet of what he had begun to fore- 
see with amazing lucidity. It is a sort of social fairy-tale, 
where every one has exquisite beauty, limitless wealth, 
and exalted rank, where the impossible and the hyperbolic 
are the only homely virtues. There has always been a 
tendency to exalt Vivian Grey at the expense of The 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 157 



Young Duke (1831), Disraeli's next leading permanence; 
and, indeed, the former has had its admirers who have 
preferred it to all the others in this period. The difference 
is, however, not so marked as might be supposed. In 
The Young Duke the manner is not so burlesque, but 
there is the same roughness of execution, combined with 
the same rush and fire. In either book, what we feel 
to-day to be the great objection to our enjoyment is the 
lack of verisimilitude. Who can believe in the existence 
of persons whose titles are the Earl of Fitz-Pompey and 
Baron Deprivyseal, or whose names are Lady Aphrodite 
and Sir Carte Blanche? The descriptions are " high- 
falutin" beyond all endurance, and there is particularly 
noticeable a kind of stylistic foppery, which is always 
hovering between sublimity and a giggle. 

But here is an example, from Vivian Grey, of Disraeli's 
earliest manner : — 

" After a moment had passed, he was pouring forth in a 
rapid voice, and incoherent manner, such words as men 
speak only once. He spoke of his early follies, his mis- 
fortunes, his misery; of his matured views, his settled 
principles, his plans, his prospects, his hopes, his happiness, 
his bliss ; and when he had ceased, he listened, in his turn, 
to some small still words, which made him the happiest of 
human beings. He bent down, he kissed the soft silken 
cheek which now he could call his own. Her hand was in 
his; her head sank upon his breast. Suddenly she clung 
to him with a strong clasp. ' Violet ! my own, my dearest ; 
you are overcome. I have been rash, I have been impru- 
dent. Speak, speak, my beloved ! say, you are not ill ! ' 

" She spoke not, but clung to him with a fearful strength, 
her head still upon his breast, her full eyes closed. Alarmed, 
he raised her off the ground, and bore her to the river-side. 
Water might revive her. But when he tried to lay her a 



158 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



moment on the bank, she clung to him gasping, as a sink- 
ing person clings to a stout swimmer. He leant over her ; 
he did not attempt to disengage her arms ; and, by degrees, 
by very slow degrees, her grasp loosened. At last her 
arms gave way and fell by her side, and her eyes partly 
opened. 

" ' Thank God ! Violet, my own, my beloved, say you 

are better ! 1 

" She answered not, evidently she did not know him, 
evidently she did not see him. A film was on her sight, 
and her eye was glassy. He rushed to the water-side, and 
in a moment he had sprinkled her temples, now covered 
with a cold dew. Her pulse beat not, her circulation 
seemed suspended. He rubbed the palms of her hands, he 
covered her delicate feet with his coat, and then rushing 
up the bank into the road, he shouted with frantic cries 
on all sides. No one came, no one was near. Again, with 
a cry of fearful anguish, he shouted as if an hyena were 
feeding on his vitals. No sound ; no answer. The nearest 
cottage was above a mile of?. He dared not leave her. 
Again he rushed down to the water-side. Her eyes were 
still open, still fixed. Her mouth also was no longer closed. 
Her hand was stiff, her heart had ceased to beat. He tried 
with the warmth of his own body to revive her. He 
shouted, he wept, he prayed. All, all in vain. Again he 
was in the road, again shouting like an insane being. 
There was a sound. Hark ! It was but the screech of 
an owl ! 

" Once more at the river-side, once more bending over her 
with starting eyes, once more the attentive ear listening for 
the soundless breath. No sound ! not even a sigh ! Oh ! 
what would he have given for her shriek of anguish ! No 
change had occurred in her position, but the lower part of 
her face had fallen; and there was a general appearance 
which struck him with awe. Her body was quite cold, 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 159 



her limbs stiffened. He gazed, and gazed, and gazed. He 
bent over her with stupor rather than grief stamped on 
his features. It was very slowly that the dark thought 
came over his mind, very slowly that the horrible truth 
seized upon his soul. He gave a loud shriek, and fell on 
the lifeless body of Violet Fane ! " 

A line in Disraeli's unfortunate tragedy of Alar cos 
pathetically admits : " Ay ! ever pert is youth that baffles 
age ! " The youth of Disraeli was "pert" beyond all 
record, and those who cannot endure to be teased should 
not turn to his early romances, or, indeed, to any of his 
writings. Henrietta Temple is the boldest attempt he 
ever made to tell a great consecutive story of passion, and 
no doubt there have been those who have palpitated over 
the love-at-first-sight of Ferdinand Armine and Henrietta 
Temple. But Disraeli's serious vein is here over-luscious; 
the love-passages are too emphatic and too sweet. An early 
critic spoke of this dulcia vitia of style which we meet with 
even in Contarini Fleming as the sin by which the young 
author was most easily beset. His attempts at serious 
sentiment and pompous reflection are too often deplorable, 
because inanimate and stilted. When he warns a heroine 
against an error of judgment by shouting, " 'Tis the mad- 
ness of the fawn who gazes with adoration on the lurid 
glare of the anaconda's eye," or murmurs, " Farewell, my 
lovely bird; I'll soon return to pillow in thy jiest," we 
need all the stimulus of his irony and his velocity to carry 
us over such marshlands of cold style. 

Of these imperfections, fewer are to be found in 
Venetia and fewest in Contarini Fleming. This beau- 
tiful romance is by far the best of Disraeli's early 
books, and that in which his methods at this period can 
be most favourably studied. A curious shadow of Disraeli 
himself is thrown over it all; it cannot be styled in any 



160 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



direct sense an autobiography, and yet the mental and 
moral experiences of the author animate every chapter 
of it. This novel is written with far more ease and grace 
than any previous book of the author's, and Contarini 
gives a reason which explains the improvement in his 
creator's manner when he remarks : "I wrote with greater 
facility than before, because my experience of life was so 
much increased that I had no difficulty in making my 
characters think and act." Contarini Fleming belongs to 
183 1, when its writer, at the comparatively ripe age of 
twenty-seven, had already seen a vast deal of man and of 
the world of Europe. 

We are not to believe the preposterous account that 
Contarini-Disraeli gives of his methods of composition : — 

" My thoughts, my passion, the rush of my invention, 
were too quick for my pen. Page followed page; as a 
sheet was finished I threw it on the floor ; I was amazed 
at the rapid and prolific production, yet I could not stop to 
wonder. In half a dozen hours I sank back exhausted, 
with an aching frame. I rang the bell, ordered some 
refreshment, and walked about the room. The wine 
invigorated me and warmed up my sinking fancy, which, 
however, required little fuel. I set to it again, and it was 
midnight before I retired to bed." 

At this rate we may easily compute that the longest 
of his novels would be finished in a week. Contarini 
Fleming seems to have occupied him the greater part of 
a year. He liked the public to think of him, exquisitely 
habited, his long essenced hair falling about his eyes, 
flinging forth a torrent of musky and mellifluous improvisa- 
tion; as a matter of fact he was a very hard worker, 
laborious in the arts of composition. 

It is to be noted that the whole tone of Contarini 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 161 



Fleming is intensely literary. The appeal to the intel- 
lectual, to the fastidious reader is incessant. This is an 
attitude always rare in English fiction, but at that epoch 
almost unknown, and its presence in the writings of 
Disraeli gives them a cachet. Under all the preposterous 
conversation, all the unruly turmoil of description, there 
runs a strong thread of entirely sober, political, and philo- 
sophical ambition. Disraeli striving with all his might to 
be a great poet, of the class of Byron and Goethe, a poet 
who is also a great mover and master of men — this is 
what is manifest to us throughout Contarini Fleming. 
It is almost pathetically manifest, because Disraeli — what- 
ever else he grew to be — never became a poet. And here, 
too, his wonderful clairvoyance, and his command over 
the vagaries of his own imagination, come into play, for 
he never persuades himself, with all his dithyrambics, 
that Contarini is quite a poet. 

A new influence is felt upon his style, and it is a highly 
beneficial one. Up to this date, Disraeli had kept Byron 
before him, and in his serious moments he had endeavoured 
to accomplish in prose what the mysterious and melancholy 
poet of the preceding generation had done in verse. The 
general effect of this Byronism, in spite of a certain buoy- 
ancy which carried the reader onwards, had been apt to be 
wearisome, in consequence of the monotony of effort. 
The fancy of the author had been too uniformly grandiose, 
and in the attempt to brighten it up he had sometimes 
passed over into positive failure. The most unyielding 
admirers of his early novels can hardly contradict a reader 
who complains that he finds the adventures of the bandits 
at Jonstorna insupportable and the naivete of Christiana 
mawkish. There are pages in Alroy that read as if they 
were written for a wager, to see how much balderdash the 
public will endure. Disraeli seems to have been conscious 
of this weakness, and he tried to relieve the pompous 

M 



1 62 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



gravity of his passionate scenes by episodes of irony and 
satire. From his earliest days these were apt to be very 
happy; they were inspired, especially in the squibs, by 
Lucian and Swift. 

But in Contarini Fleming we detect a new flavour, 
and it is a very fortunate one. The bitterness of Swift 
was never quite in harmony with the genius of Disraeli, 
but the irony of Voltaire was. The effect of reading 
Zadig and Candide was the completion of the style of 
Disraeli ; that " strange mixture of brilliant fantasy 
and poignant truth" which he rightly perceived to be 
the essence of the philosophic conies of Voltaire, finished 
his own intellectual education. Henceforth he does not 
allow his seriousness to overweigh his liveliness; if he 
detects a tendency to bombast, he relieves it with a 
brilliant jest. Count de Moltke and the lampoons offer 
us a case to our hand; " he was just the old fool who 
would make a cream cheese," says Contarini, and the 
startled laugh which greets him is exactly of the same 
order as those which were wont to reward the statesman's 
amazing utterances in Parliament. 

In spite of a certain undeniable insipidity, the volumes 
of Contarini Fleming cannot but be read with pleasure. 
The mixture of Byron and Voltaire is surprising, but it 
produces some agreeable effects. There is a dash of Shelley 
in it, too, for the life on the isle of Paradise with Alcest6 
Contarini is plainly borrowed from Epiphsychidion. 
Disraeli does not even disdain a touch of " Monk" Lewis 
without his voluptuousness, and of Mrs. Radcliffe without 
her horrors, for he is bent on serving up an olio entirely 
in the taste of the day. But through it all he is con- 
spicuously himself, and the dedication to beauty and the 
extraordinary intellectual exultation of such a book as 
Contarini Fleming are borrowed from no exotic source. 

It is impossible to overlook the fascination which Venice 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 163 



exercises over Disraeli in these early novels. Contarini's 
great ambition was to indite " a tale which should embrace 
Venice and Greece." Byron's Life and Letters and the 
completion of Rogers' Italy with Turner's paradisaical 
designs had recently awakened to its full the romantic 
interest which long had been gathering around " the sun- 
girt city." Whenever Disraeli reaches Venice his style 
improves, and if he mourns over her decay, his spirits rise 
when he has to describe her enchantments by moonlight. 
He reserves his most delicate effects for Greece and 
Venice : — 

" A Grecian sunset ! The sky is like the neck of a dove ! 
the rocks and waters are bathed with a violet light. Each 
moment it changes; each moment it shifts into more 
graceful and more gleaming shadows. And the thin white 
moon is above all; the thin white moon, followed by a 
single star, like a lady by a page." 

There are many passages as sumptuous as this in Venetia, 
the romance about Byron and Shelley, which Disraeli was 
thought indiscreet in publishing so soon after Byron's 
death. In the story the heroine Venetia is the daughter 
of Shelley (Marmion Herbert) and the bride of Byron 
(Lord Cadurcis). Marmion is a most melodramatic figure, 
but the indiscretions are not noticeable nowadays, while 
the courage with which the reviled and hated Shelley is 
described in the preface to Lord Lyndhurst as one of " the 
most renowned and refined spirits that have adorned these 
our latter days" is highly characteristic of Disraeli. The 
reception of Lord Cadurcis in the House of Peers and the 
subsequent riot in Palace Yard mark, perhaps, the highest 
point in direct narrative power which the novelist had yet 
reached ; but Venetia was not liked, and Disraeli withdrew 
from literature into public life. 



164 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



II 

When Disraeli resumed the art of the novelist, he was 
no longer talking of what lay outside his experience when 
he touched on politics. In 1837 ne na d entered the House 
at last, as Member for Maidstone, and although his enemies 
roared him down on the first occasion of his rising to speak, 
he soon learned how to impose his voice on Parliament. 
In 1839 his declaration that " the rights of labour are as 
sacred as the rights of property " made him famous, and 
in 1841 he was one of Sir Robert Peel's Conservative army 
in the House. Then followed the formation of the Young 
England Party, with Disraeli as one of its leaders; these 
men broke away from Peel, and held that the Toiy Party 
required stringent reform from within. It was in 1843 
that Henry Thomas Hope, of Deepdene, urged, at a meet- 
ing of the Young Englanders, the expediency of Disraeli's 
" treating in a literary form those views and subjects which 
were the matter of their frequent conversations." Disraeli 
instantly returned to literary composition, and produced 
in quick succession the four books which form the second 
section of his work as an author; these are Coningsby, 
Sybil, Tancred, and the Life of Lord George Bentinck. 

In this group of books we observe, in the first place., a 
great advance in vitality and credibility over the novels 
of the earlier period. Disraeli is now describing what he 
knows, no longer what he hopes in process of time to know. 
He writes from within, no longer from without the world 
of political action. These three novels and a biography 
are curiously like one another in form, and all equally 
make a claim to be considered not mere works of entertain- 
ment, but serious contributions to political philosophy. 
The assumption is borne out by the character of the 
books, each of which had a definite aim and purpose. 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 165 



Coningsby was designed to make room for new talent 
in the Tory Party by an unflinching attack on the " medio- 
crities/ 9 In Sybil the heartless abuse of capital and 
the vices of class distinction are exposed. Tancred is a 
vision of better things to follow upon the reforms already 
indicated. In Lord George Bentinck, under the guise of a 
record of the struggle between Protection and Free Trade, 
we have a manual of personal conduct as applied to 
practical politics. 

In all these works narrative pure and simple inclines to 
take a secondary place. It does so least in Coningsby 
which, as a story, is the most attractive book of Disraeli's 
middle period, and one of the most brilliant studies of 
political character ever published. The tale is interspersed 
with historical essays, which impede its progress but add 
to its weight and value. Where, however, the author 
throws himself into his narrative, the advance he has made 
in power, and particularly in truth of presentment, is very 
remarkable. In the early group of his novels he had felt 
a great difficulty in transcribing conversations so as to 
produce a natural and easy effect. He no longer, in 
Coningsby, is confronted by this artificiality. His dia- 
logues are now generally remarkable for their ease and 
nature. The speeches of Rigby (who represents John 
Wilson Croker), of Lord Monmouth (who stands for Lord 
Hertford), of the Young Englanders themselves, of the 
laughable chorus of Taper and Tadpole, who never " de- 
spaired of the Commonwealth," are often extremely 
amusing. In Coningsby we have risen out of the 
rose-coloured mist of unreality which hung over books 
like The Young Duke and Henrietta Temple. The agitated 
gentleman whose peerage hangs in the balance, and who 
on hearing that the Duke of Wellington is with the 
King breathes out in a sigh of relief " Then there is a 
Providence/' is a type of the subsidiary figure which 



1 66 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Disraeli had now learned to introduce with infinite lightness 

of irony. 

Disraeli had a passion for early youth, and in almost all 
his books he dwells lovingly upon its characteristics. It 
is particularly in Contarini Fleming and in Coningsby — 
that is to say, in the best novels of his first and of his 
second period — that he lingers over the picture of schoolboy 
life with tenderness and sympathy. We have only to com- 
pare them, however, to see how great an advance he had 
made in ten years in his power of depicting such scenes. 
The childish dreams of Contarini are unchecked romance, 
and though the friendship with Musaeus is drawn with 
delicacy and insight, and though that is an extremely 
pretty scene where Christiana soothes the pride of Con- 
tarini, yet a manliness and a reality are missing which we 
find in the wonderful Eton scenes of Coningsby. 

Disraeli's comprehension of the feelings of half -grown 
ambitious boys of good family was extraordinary, and 
when we consider that he had never been to a public school, 
his picture of the life and conversation at Eton is remark- 
able for its fidelity to nature. The relation of the elder 
schoolboys to one another — a theme to which he was fond 
of recurring — is treated in a very adroit and natural spirit, 
not without a certain Dorian beauty. This preoccupation 
with the sentiments and passions of schoolboys was rather 
crudely found fault with at the time. We need have no 
difficulty in comprehending the pleasure he felt in watch- 
ing the expansion of those youthful minds from whom he 
hoped for all that was to make England wise and free. The 
account of Coningsby' s last night at Eton is one of the most 
deeply felt pages which Disraeli ever composed, and here 
it may be said that the careful avoidance of all humour — 
an act of self-denial which a smaller writer would not have 
been capable of — is justified by the dignified success of a 
very dangerous experiment. 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 167 



The portraiture of living people is performed with the 
greatest good-nature. It is difficult to believe that the 
most sensitive and the most satirised could really be 
infuriated, so kindly and genial is the caricaturing. We 
are far here from Swift's bludgeon and from Voltaire's 
poisoned needle. The regeneration of the social order in 
England, as Disraeli dreamed it, involved the removal of 
some mediocrities, but he was neither angry nor impatient. 
The " brilliant personages who had just scampered up from 
Melton, thinking it probable that Sir Robert might want 
some moral Lords of the Bedchamber/' and the Duke, who 
" might have acquired considerable information, if he had 
not in his youth made so many Latin verses," were true to 
their principles, and would scarcely have done more than 
blush faintly when he poked his fun at them. Of all the 
portraits none is more interesting than that of the dark, 
pale stranger, Sidonia, as he revealed himself to Coningsby 
at the inn in the forest, over the celebrated dish of " still- 
hissing bacon and eggs that looked like tufts of primroses." 
-This was a figure which was to recur, and to become in the 
public mind almost coincident with that of Disraeli himself. 

When we pass from Coningsby to Sybil we find the 
purely narrative interest considerably reduced in the 
pursuit of a scheme of political philosophy. This is of all 
Disraeli's novels the one which most resembles a pamphlet 
on a serious topic. For this reason it has never been a 
favourite among his works, and his lighter readers have 
passed it over with a glance. Sybil, however, is best not 
read at all if it is not carefully studied. In the course of 
Coningsby, that young hero had found his way to Man- 
chester, and had discovered in it a new world, " poignant 
with new ideas, and suggestive of new trains of thought 
and feeling." His superficial observation had revealed 
many incongruities in our methods of manipulating wealth, 
and Disraeli had sketched the portrait of Mr. Jawster Sharp 



1 68 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



with a superfluity of sarcastic wit. But it was not until 
somewhat later that the condition of the working-classes 
in our northern manufacturing districts began to attract 
his most serious attention. The late Duke of Rutland, that 
illustrious and venerable friend who alone survived in the 
twentieth century to bear witness to the sentiments of 
Young England, told me that he accompanied Disraeli on 
the journey which led to the composition of Sybil, and 
that he never, in long years of intimacy, saw him so 
profoundly moved as he was at the aspect of the miserable 
dwellings of the hand-loom workers. 

All this is reflected on the surface of Sybil, and, notwith- 
standing curious faults in execution, the book bears the 
impress of a deep and true emotion. Oddly enough, the 
style of Disraeli is never more stilted than it is in the con- 
versations of the poor in this story. When Gerard, the 
weaver, wishes to prevent the police-inspector from arrest- 
ing his daughter, he remarks : " Advance and touch this 
maiden, and I will fell you and your minions like oxen at 
their pasture." Well may the Serjeant answer, " You are 
a queer chap." Criticism goes further and says, " You 
are a chap who never walked in wynd or factory of a York- 
shire town/' This want of nature, which did not extend 
to Disraeli's conversations among well-to-do folks, was a 
real misfortune, and gave Sybil no chance of holding its 
own in rivalry with such realistic studies of the depression 
of trade in Manchester as Mrs. Gaskell was presently to 
produce, nor with the ease of dialogue in Dickens' Christ- 
mas Stories, which were just now (in 1845) running their 
popular course. A happier simplicity of style, founded on 
a closer familiarity, would have given fresh force to his 
burning indignation, and have helped the cause of Devils- 
dust and Dandy Mick. But the accident of stilted speech 
must not blind us to the sincere and glowing emotion that 
inspired the pictures of human suffering in Sybil. 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 169 



Then followed Tancred, which, as it has always been 
reported, continued to the last to be the author's favourite 
among his literary offspring. Disraeli had little sympathy 
with either of the great parties which in that day governed 
English political life. As time went on, he became surer 
than ever of the degeneracy of modern society, and he began 
to despair of discovering any cure for it. In Tancred he 
laid aside in great measure his mood of satirical extrava- 
gance. The whole of this book is steeped in the colours of 
poetry — of poetry, that is to say, as the florid mind of 
Disraeli conceived it. It opens — as all his books love to 
open — with the chronicle of an ardent and innocent boy's 
career. This is commonplace, but when Tancred, who is 
mainly the author's customary type of young Englishman 
born in the purple, arrives in the Holy Land, a flush of pure 
romance passes over the whole texture of the narrative. 
Real life is forgotten, and we move in a fabulous, but 
intensely picturesque, world of ecstasy and dream. 

The Prerogation of Judaism, as it had been laid down 
by Sidonia in Coningsby, is emphasised and developed, 
and is indeed made the central theme of the story in 
Tancred. This novel is inspired by an outspoken and 
enthusiastic respect for the Hebrew race and a perfect 
belief in its future. In the presence of the mighty monu- 
ments of Jerusalem, Disraeli forgets that he is a Christian 
and an ambitious member of the English Parliament. His 
only solicitude is to recover his privileges as a Jew, and 
to recollect that he stands in the majestic cradle of his race. 
He becomes interpenetrated with solemn mysticism; a 
wind of faith blows in his hair. He cries, " God never 
spoke except to an Arab/' and we are therefore not sur- 
prised to find an actual Divine message presently pro- 
nounced in Tancred' s ears as he stands on the summit of 
Mount Sinai. This is, perhaps, the boldest flight of 
imagination which occurs in the writings of Disraeli. 



170 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Tancred endeavours to counteract the purely Hebraic 
influences of Palestine by making a journey of homage to 
Astarte, a mysterious and beautiful Pagan queen — an 
" Aryan/' as he loves to put it— who reigns in the moun- 
tains of Syria. But even she does not encourage him to 
put his trust in the progress of Western Europe. 

Tancred is written in Disraeli's best middle style, full, 
sonorous, daring, and rarely swelling into bombast. It 
would even be too uniformly grave if the fantastic character 
of Facredeen did not relieve the solemnity of the discourse 
with his amusing tirades. Like that of all Disraeli's novels, 
the close of this one is dim and unsatisfactory. If there is 
anything that the patient reader wants to know it is how 
the Duke and Duchess of Bellemont behaved to the Lady 
of Bethany when they arrived at Jerusalem and found their 
son in the kiosk under her palm-tree. But this is curiosity 
of a class which Disraeli is not unwilling to awaken, but 
which he never cares to satisfy. He places the problems 
in a heap before us, and he leaves us to untie the knots. 
It is a highly characteristic trait of his mind as a writer 
that he is for ever preoccupied with the beginnings of things, 
and as little as possible with their endings. 

It is not, however, from Tancred but from Coningsby, 
that we take our example of Disraeli's second manner : — 

" Even to catch Lord Monmouth's glance was not an easy 
affair ; he was much occupied on one side by the great lady, 
on the other were several gentlemen who occasionally joined 
in the conversation. But something must be done. 

u There ran through Coningsby's character, as we have 
before mentioned, a vein of simplicity which was not its 
least charm. It resulted, no doubt, in a great degree 
from the earnestness of his nature. There never was a 
boy so totally devoid of affectation, which was remarkable, 
for he had a brilliant imagination, a quality that, from 
its fantasies, and the vague and indefinite desires it en- 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 171 



genders, generally makes those whose characters are not 
formed, affected. The Duchess, who was a fine judge of 
character, and who greatly regarded Coningsby, often 
mentioned this trait as one which, combined with his great 
abilities and acquirements so unusual at his age, rendered 
him very interesting. In the present instance it happened 
that, while Coningsby was watching his grandfather, he 
observed a gentleman advance, make his bow, say and 
receive a few words and retire. This little incident, how- 
ever, made a momentary diversion in the immediate circle 
of Lord Monmouth, and before they could all resume their 
former talk and fall into their previous positions, an impulse 
sent forth Coningsby, who walked up to Lord Monmouth, 
and standing before him, said, 
" ' How do you do, grandpapa ? ' 

" Lord Monmouth beheld his grandson. His compre- 
hensive and penetrating glance took in every point with 
a flash. There stood before him one of the handsomest 
youths* he had ever seen, with a mien as graceful as his 
countenance was captivating ; and his whole air breathing 
that freshness and ingenuousness which none so much 
appreciates as the used man of the world. And this was 
his child; the only one of his blood to whom he had 
been kind. It would be an exaggeration to say that 
Lord Monmouth's heart was touched; but his good-nature 
effervesced, and his fine taste was deeply gratified. He 
perceived in an instant such a relation might be a valuable 
adherent ; an irresistible candidate for future elections : 
a brilliant tool to work out the Dukedom. All these 
impressions and ideas, and many more, passed through 
the quick brain of Lord Monmouth ere the sound of 
Coningsby' s words had seemed to cease, and long before 
the surrounding guests had recovered from the surprise 
which they had occasioned them, and which did not 
diminish, when Lord Monmouth, advancing, placed his 
arms round Coningsby with a dignity of affection that 



172 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



would have become Louis XIV., and then, in the high 
manner of the old Court, kissed him on each cheek. 

" * Welcome to your home/ said Lord Monmouth. ' You 
have grown a great deal.' 

" Then Lord Monmouth led the agitated Coningsby to 
the great lady, who was a Princess and an Ambassadress, 
and then, placing his arm gracefully in that of his grand- 
son, he led him across the room, and presented him in 
due form to some royal blood that was his guest, in the 
shape of a Russian Grand Duke. His Imperial Highness 
received our hero as graciously as the grandson of Lord 
Monmouth might expect ; but no greeting can be imagined 
warmer than the one he received from the lady with whom 
the Grand Duke was conversing. She was a dame whose 
beauty was mature, but still radiant. Her figure was 
superb; her dark hair crowned with a tiara of curious 
workmanship. Her rounded arm was covered with costly 
bracelets, but not a jewel on her finely-formed bust, and 
the least possible rouge on her still oval cheek. Madame 
Colonna retained her charms." 

Ill 

Nearly a quarter of a century passed, during which 
Disraeli slowly rose to the highest honours in the State. 
Lord Derby died, and the novelist, already Leader of the 
House of Commons, found himself called to be Prime 
Minister of England. His first administration, however, 
was brief, and in the last days of 1868 he resigned in favour 
of Mr. Gladstone. The Liberals were in for five years, 
and Disraeli, in opposition, found a sort of tableland 
stretch in front of him after so much arduous climbing. 
It was at this moment, shortly after the resignation of 
the Tory Minister, that the publisher of a magazine ap- 
proached him with the request that he would write a novel 
to appear in its pages. He was offered, it is said, a sum 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 173 



of money far in excess of what any one, at that time, had 
ever received for " serial rights/' Disraeli refused the 
offer, but it may have drawn his thoughts back to litera- 
ture, and in the course of 1869, after the disestablishment 
of the Church of Ireland was completed, he found time to 
write what is unquestionably the greatest of his literary 
works — the superb ironic romance of Lothair. 

Eminent as he was and eminently successful, Disraeli 
was far, in 1870, from having conquered public opinion 
in England. The reception of his new novel was noisy, 
and enjoyed to the full the clamours of advertisement, but 
it was not favourable. The critics laughed it to scorn, 
and called it a farce and a failure. The Quarterly Review, 
in the course of a savage diatribe, declared that it was 
" as dull as ditch-water and as flat as a flounder/' and in a 
graver mood reproved it as a mere " bid for the bigoted 
voices of Exeter Hall." Some of the criticisms were not 
wanting in acumen. It was perceived at once that, as 
Theodora Campion is the heroine of the book, it was an 
error in art to kill her off in the middle of it. Moreover, 
it is only fair to admit that if the stormy Parliamentarian 
life Disraeli had led so long had given him immense personal 
advantages, it had also developed some defects. It had 
taught him boundless independence and courage, it had 
given him a rare experience of men and manners, and it 
had lifted his satire far above petty or narrow personal 
considerations, But it had encouraged a looseness of 
utterance, a mixture of the colloquial and the bombastic, 
which was unfortunate. In the best parts of Coningsby and 
of Tancred he had shown himself a very careless writer of 
English. But Lothair, even in its corrected form — and 
the first edition is a miracle of laxity — is curiously incor- 
rect. It reads as though it were taken down from the 
flowing speech of a fine orator, not as though it were pain- 
fully composed in a study ; it contains surprising ellipses, 
strange freaks of grammar. There was all this, and more, 



174 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



to encourage the critics, whom Disraeli had gone out of 
his way to affront in a violent epigram, to attack Lothair 
with contempt and resentment. 

The critics took irony for timidity; they thought that 
the sardonic novelist was the dupe of the splendours which 
he invented and gloated over. But if one thing is more 
evident than another to-day it is that this gorgeous story 
of a noble boy, whose guardians, a Presbyterian earl and a 
Roman cardinal, quarrelled for his soul and for his acres, 
is an immense satire from first to last. In Disraeli's own 
words, used in another sense, the keynote of Lothair is 
" mockery blended with Ionian splendour." Never had 
he mocked so dauntlessly, never had his fancy been more 
exuberant, and those who criticise the magnificence must 
realise that it was intentional. It was thus that Disraeli 
loved to see life, and, most of all, the life he laughed at. 
He had always been gorgeous, but he let himself go in 
Lothair ; all is like the dream of a Lorenzo dei Medicis or an 
Aurungzebe. Nothing is done by halves. Muriel Towers 
was set on " the largest natural lake that inland England 
boasts " — some lake far larger than Windeimere and entirely 
unsuspected by geographers. This piece of water is studded 
with u green islands," which is natural. But the author 
cannot stay his hand : this largest of the English lakes is 
also alive with " golden gondolas," which are rarer objects. 
In one of the odd little flashes of self-criticism which illu- 
minate the book Lothair says of a certain northern garden, 
with its fanes and its fountains, its glittering statues and 
its Babylonian terraces, that there are " perhaps too many 
temples." 

There are perhaps too many temples in the landscape 
of Lothair, but they were put in on purpose. The splen- 
dour is part of the satire. When the hero has ordered an 
architect to make some plans for a building, the door opens 
and servants enter bearing " a large and magnificent port- 
folio of morocco, made of prelatial purple with broad bands 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 175 



of gold and alternate ornaments of a cross and a coronet/' 
It is the sort of portfolio that Belshazzar might have used, 
but no English master-builder since time began ever 
launched forth into such splendour. This is characteristic 
of Disraeli and of his book ; it pleased him to wrap all his 
fancies in jewelled cloth of gold. He chose that the world 
should consist of nothing but Tudor palaces in colossal 
parks, and that time should be no other than a perpetual 
Holy Week of golden ceremonial. He knew his public, 
and that it adored these follies. He spoke to them in 
the language that they loved, but in a tone of the most 
seraphical disdain and irony. 

What marks the whole of Disraeli's writings more than 
any other quality is the buoyant and radiant temperament 
of their author. In Lothair he is like an inspired and en- 
franchised boy, set free from all the trammels of reality, 
and yet bringing to the service of his theme the results of 
an extraordinary inherited experience. If the picture is 
not real, we may take courage to say that it is far better 
than reality — more rich, more entertaining, more intoxi- 
cating. We have said that it is carelessly written, but that 
is part of the author's superb self-confidence, and when 
he is fortunately inspired, he obtains here an ease of style, 
a mastery which he had never found before. The sureness 
of his touch is seen in the epigrams which strew the pages 
of Lothair, and have become part of our habitual speech 
— the phrase about eating " a little fruit on a green bank 
with music " ; that which describes the hansom cab, " 'Tis 
the gondola of London/ ' This may lead us on to the con- 
sideration that Disraeli is one of those who have felt most 
vividly and expressed most gaily the peculiar physical 
beauty of London. He saw the Park as the true Londoner 
sees it — when the chestnuts are in silver bloom, and the 
pink may has flushed the thorns, and banks of sloping turf 
are radiant with plots of gorgeous flowers ; when the water 
glitters in the sun, and the air is fragrant with that spell 



176 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



which only can be found in metropolitan mignonette." He 
describes as no one else has ever done with equal mastery a 
stately and successful house-party in a great country 
mansion. He had developed, when he composed Lothair, 
a fuller sense of beauty than he had ever possessed before, 
but it revelled in forms that were partly artificial and partly 
fabulous. An example of these forms may now be welcome :— 

" Mr. Giles took an early easy opportunity of apprising 
Lady Farringford that she had nearly met Cardinal 
Grandison at dinner, and that his Eminence would cer- 
tainly pay his respects to Mrs. Putney Giles in the evening. 
As Lady Farringford was at present a high ritualist, and 
had even been talked of as ' going to Rome/ this intelligence 
was stunning, and it was observed that her Ladyship was 
unusually subdued during the whole of the second course. 

" On the right of Lothair sate the wife of a Vice-Chancel- 
lor, a quiet and pleasing lady, to whom Lothair, with 
natural good breeding, paid snatches of happy attention, 
when he could for a moment with propriety withdraw him- 
self from the blaze of Apollonia' s coruscating conversation. 
Then there was a rather fierce-looking Red Ribbon, medalled 
as well as be-starred, and the Red Ribbon's wife, with a 
blushing daughter, in spite of her parentage not yet accus- 
tomed to stand fire. A partner and his unusually numerous 
family had the pleasure also of seeing Lothair for the first 
time, and there were no less than four M.P/s, one of whom 
was even in office. 

" Apollonia was stating to Lothair, with brilliant per- 
spicuity, the reasons which quite induced her to believe 
that the Gulf Stream had changed its course, and the 
political and social consequences that might accrue. 

1 ' The religious sentiment of the Southern races must 
be wonderfully affected by a more rigorous climate/ said 
Apollonia. ' I cannot doubt/ she continued, ' that a series 
of severe winters at Rome might put an end to Romanism/ 



The Novels of Benjamin Disraeli 177 



" ' But is there any fear that a reciprocal influence might 
be exercised on the Northern nations ? ' inquired Lothair. 
' Would there be any apprehension of our Protestantism 
becoming proportionately relaxed ? ' 

" ' Of course not/ said Apollonia. ' Truth cannot be 
affected by climate. Truth is truth alike in Palestine and 
Scandinavia/ 

" ' I wonder what the Cardinal would think of this/ said 
Lothair, ' who, you tell me, is coming to you this evening/ 

" ' Yes, I am most interested to see him, though he is 
the most puissant of our foes. Of course he would take 
refuge in sophistry ; and science, you know, they deny/ 

" ' Cardinal Grandison is giving some lectures on science/ 
said the Vice-Chancellor's lady, quietly. 

" * It is remorse/ said Apollonia. ' Their clever men can 
never forget that unfortunate affair of Galileo, and think 
they can divert the indignation of the nineteenth century by 
mock zeal about red sandstone or the origin of species/ 

" ' And are you afraid of the Gulf Stream? ' inquired 
Lothair of his calmer neighbour. 

" ' I think we want more evidence of a change. The 
Vice-Chancellor and I went down to a place we have near 
town on Saturday, where there is a very nice piece of 
water; indeed, some people call it a lake; it was quite 
frozen, and my boys wanted to skate, but that I would 
not permit/ 

" ' You believe in the Gulf Stream to that extent/ said 
Lothair ; ' no skating/ 

" The Cardinal came early; the ladies had not long 
left the dining-room. They were agitated when his name 
was announced ; even Apollonia' s heart beat ; but then that 
might be accounted for by the inopportune recollection of 
an occasional correspondence with Caprera. 

" Nothing could exceed the simple suavity with which 
the Cardinal appeared, approached, and greeted them. He 
thanked Apollonia for her permission to pay his respects 

N 



178 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



to her, which he had long wished to do; and then they 
were all presented, and he said exactly the right thing to 

every one." 

Disraeli began his career, as I have pointed out in the 
earlier part of this essay, as a purveyor of entertainment 
to the public in a popular and not very dignified kind. He 
contended with the crowd of fashionable novelists whose 
books consoled the leisure of Mrs. Wititterly as she reclined 
on the drawing-room sofa. He found rivals in Bulwer and 
Mrs. Gore, and a master in Plumer Ward. His brilliant 
stories sold, but at first they won him little advantage. 
Slowly, by dint of his inherent force of genius, his books 
have not merely survived their innumerable fellows, but 
they have come to represent to us the form and character 
of a whole school ; nay, more, they have come to take the 
place in our memories of a school which, but for them, would 
have utterly passed away and been forgotten. Disraeli, 
accordingly, is unique, not merely because his are the 
only fashionable novels of the pre- Victorian era which 
any one ever reads nowadays, but because in his person 
that ineffable manner of the " thirties" reaches an isolated 
sublimity and finds a permanent place in literature. But 
if we take a still wider view of the literary career of Disraeli, 
we are bound to perceive that the real source of the interest 
which his brilliant books continue to possess is the evidence 
their pages reveal of the astonishing personal genius of 
the man. Do what we will, we find ourselves looking be- 
yond Contarini Fleming and Sidonia and Vivian Grey to 
the adventurous Jew who, by dint of infinite resolution 
and an energy which never slept, conquered all the preju- 
dices of convention, and trod English society beneath his 
foot in the triumphant irony of success. It is the living 
Disraeli who is always more salient than the most fascinat- 
ing of his printed pages. 



THREE EXPERIMENTS 
PORTRAITURE 



1 



THREE EXPERIMENTS IN 
PORTRAITURE 

i 

LADY DOROTHY NEVILL 

An Open Letter 

Dear Lady Burghclere, 

When we met for the first time after the death of our 
friend, you desired me to produce what you were kind 
enough to call " one of my portraits." But the art of the 
portrait-writer is capricious, and at that time I felt wholly 
disinclined for the adventure. I excused myself on the 
ground that the three thick volumes of her reminiscences 
made a further portrait needless, and I reflected, though I 
did not say, that the difficulties of presenting the evanescent 
charm and petulant wit of Lady Dorothy were insuperable. 
I partly think so still, but your command has lingered in 
my memory all these months, and I have determined to 
attempt to obey you, although what I send you can be no 
" portrait,' ' but a few leaves torn out of a painter- writer's 
sketch-book. 

The existence of the three published volumes does, after 
all, not preclude a more intimate study, because they are 
confessedly exterior. They represent what she saw and 
heard, not what others perceived in her. In the first place, 
they are very much better written than she would have 
written them herself, I must dwell presently on the curious 

181 



1 82 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



fact that, with all her wit, she possessed no power of sus- 
tained literary expression. Her Memoirs were composed, as 
you know, by Mr. Ralph Nevill, who is a practised writer, 
and not otherwise could they have been given to the public. 
On this point her own evidence is explicit. She wrote 
to me, in all the excitement of the success of the volume of 
1906 : " The Press has been wonderfully good to my little 
efforts, but to Ralph the better part is due, as, out of the 
tangled remnants of my brain, he extracted these old anec- 
dotes of my early years.' ' This is as bravely characteristic 
of her modesty as it is of her candour, but I think it shows 
that there is still room for some record of the more intimate 
features of her charming and elusive character. I take up 
my pencil, but with little hope of success, sigce no more 
formidable task could be set me. I will at least try to be, 
as she would have scorned me for not being, sincere. 

My friendship with Lady Dorothy Nevill occupied more 
than a quarter of a century. I met her first in the house of 
Sir Redvers and Lady Audrey Buller in the winter of 1887, 
soon after their return from Ireland. She had done me the 
great honour of desiring that I should be invited to meet her. 
She had known my venerable relative, the zoologist, Thomas 
Bell of Selborne, and she had corresponded in years long 
past, about entomology, with my father. We talked to- 
gether on that first occasion for hours, and it seems to me 
that I was lifted, without preliminaries, into her intimacy. 
From that afternoon, until I drank tea with her for the last 
time, ten days before her death, the precious link was never 
loosened. 

In 1887, her great social popularity had not begun. She 
was, I now know, already near sixty, but it never occurred 
to me to consider her age. She possessed a curious static 
quality, a perennial youthfulness. Every one must have 
observed how like Watts' picture of her at twenty she still 
was at eighty-six. This was not preserved by any arts 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 183 



or fictile graces. She rather affected, prematurely, the dress 
and appearance of an elderly woman. I remember her as 
always the same, very small and neat, very pretty with her 
chiselled nose, the fair oval of her features, the slightly ironic, 
slightly meditative smile, the fascinating colour of the 
steady eyes, beautifully set in the head, with the eyebrows 
rather lifted as in a perpetual amusement of curiosity. Her 
head, slightly sunken into the shoulders, was often poised 
a little sideways, like a bird's that contemplates a hemp-seed. 
She had no quick movements, no gestures ; she held herself 
very still. It always appeared to me that, in face of her 
indomitable energy and love of observation, this was an 
unconscious economy of force. It gave her a very peculiar 
aspect ; I remember once frivolously saying to her that she 
looked as though she were going to " pounce' ' at me; but 
she never pounced. When she had to move, she rose 
energetically and moved with determination, but she never 
wasted a movement. Her physical strength — and she such 
a tiny creature — seemed to be wonderful. She was seldom 
unwell, although, like most very healthy people, she be- 
wailed herself with exaggerated lamentations whenever 
anything was the matter with her. But even on these 
occasions she defied what she called " coddling.' ' Once 
I found her suffering from a cold, on a very chilly day, 
without a fire, and I expostulated. She replied, with a sort 
of incongruity very characteristic of her, " Oh ! none of your 
hot bottles for me ! " In her last hours of consciousness 
she battled with the doctor's insistence that she must have 
a fire in her bedroom, and her children had to conceal the 
flame behind screens because she threatened to get out of 
bed and put it out. Her marvellous physical force has to 
be insisted on, for it was the very basis of her character. 

Her humorous petulance, her little sharp changes of voice, 
the malice of her downcast eyes, the calmness of her demure 
and easy smile — how is any impression to be given of things 



184 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



so fugitive? Her life, which had not been without its 
troubles and anxieties, became one of prolonged and intense 
enjoyment. I think that this was the main reason of the 
delight which her company gave to almost every one. She 
was like a household blaze upon a rainy day, one stretched 
out one's hands to be warmed. She guarded herself against 
the charge of being amiable. " It would be horrid to be 
amiable," she used to say, and, indeed, there was always a 
touch of sharpness about her. She was amused once because 
I told her she was like an acidulated drop, half sweet and 
half sour. " Oh ! any stupid woman can be sweet," she 
said, " it's often another name for imbecile." 

She had curious little prejudices and antipathies. I 
never fathomed the reason of her fantastic horror of the 
feasts of the Church, particularly of_ Christmas. She 
always became curiously agitated as the month of December 
waned. In her notes she inveighed, in quaint alarm, 
against the impending " Christmas pains and penalties." 
I think she disliked the disturbance of social arrangements 
which these festivals entailed. But there was more than 
that. She was certainly a little superstitious, in a mocking, 
eighteenth-century sort of way, as Madame du Deffand 
might have been. She constantly said, and still more 
frequently wrote, " D.V." after any project, even of the 
most frivolous kind. The idea was that one should be polite 
all round, in case of any contingency. When she was in the 
Riviera, she was much interested to hear that the Prince of 
Monaco had built and endowed a handsome church at Monte 
Carlo. " Very clever of him," she said, " for you never 
can tell." 

Lady Dorothy's entire absence of affectation was emin- 
ently attractive. She would be mistress of herself, though 
China fell. Her strange little activities, her needlework, 
her paperwork, her collections, were the wonder of every- 
body, but she did not require approval; she adopted them, 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 185 



in the light of day, for her own amusement. She never 
pushed her peculiarities on the notice of visitors, but, at 
the same time, if discovered in the act of some incredible 
industry, she went on with it calmly. When she was in 
Heidelberg in 1892 and successive years, what interested her 
was the oddity of the students' life ; she expatiated to me on 
their beer and their sabre-cuts. Whenever I went abroad of 
late years, I was exhorted to send her picture post-cards 
from out-of-the-way places, and " Remember that I like 
vulgar ones best/' she added imperturbably. The story is 
perhaps known to you of how, in a circle of superfine ladies, 
the conversation turned to food, and the company outdid 
one another in protestations of delicacy. This one could 
only touch a little fruit, and that one was practically con- 
fined to a cup of tea. Lady Dorothy, who had remained 
silent and detached, was appealed to as to her opinion. In 
a sort of loud cackling — a voice she sometimes surprisingly 
adopted — she replied, " Oh, give me a blow-out of tripe and 
onions ! " to the confusion of the precieuses. She had a 
wholesome respect for food, quite orthodox and old- 
fashioned, although I think she ate rather markedly little. 
But she liked that little good. She wrote to me once from 
Cannes, " This is not an intellectual place, but then the 
body rejoices in the cooking, and thanks God for that." 
She liked to experiment in foods, and her guests sometimes 
underwent strange surprises. One day she persuaded old 
Lord Wharncliffe, who was a great friend of hers, to send 
her a basket of guinea-pig, and she entertained a very dis- 
tinguished company on a fricassee of this unusual game. 
She refused to say what the dish was until every one had 
heartily partaken, and then Mr. George Russell turned 
suddenly pale and fled from the room. " Nothing but 
fancy, " remarked the hostess, composedly. When several 
years ago there was a proposal that we should feed upon 
horse-flesh, and & pwyeyor of that dainty opened a shop in 



1 86 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Mayfair, Lady Dorothy was one of the first of his customers. 
She sallied forth in person, followed by a footman with a 
basket, and bought a joint in the presence of a jeering 
populace. 

She had complete courage and absolute tolerance. Some- 
times she pretended to be timid or fanatical, but that was 
only her fun. Her toleration and courage would have given 
her a foremost place among philanthropists or social 
reformers, if her tendencies had been humanitarian. She 
might have been another Elizabeth Fry, another Florence 
Nightingale. But she had no impulse whatever towards 
active benevolence, nor any interest in masses of men and 
women. And, above all, she was not an actor, but a spec- 
tator in life, and she evaded, often with droll agility, all 
the efforts which people made to drag her into propagandas 
of various kinds. She listened to what they had to say, 
and she begged for the particulars of specially awful examples 
of the abuses they set out to remedy. She was all sympathy 
and interest, and the propagandist started with this glitter- 
ing ally in tow ; but he turned, and where was she ? She 
had slipped off, and was in contemplation of some other 
scheme of experience. 

She described her life to me, in 1901, as a " treadmill of 
friendship, perpetually on the go " ; and later she wrote : 
" I am hampered by perpetual outbursts of hospitality in 
every shape/ ' Life was a spectacle to her, and society a 
congeries of little guignols, at all of which she would fain 
be seated, in a front stall. If she complained that hos- 
pitality " hampered" her, it was not that it interfered with 
any occupation or duty, but simply that she could not eat 
luncheon at three different houses at once. I remember 
being greatly amused when I congratulated her on having 
enjoyed some eminent public funeral, by her replying, 
grudgingly : " Yes — but I lost another most interesting 
ceremony through its being at the same hour." She grum- 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 187 



bled : " People are tugging me to go and see things/' not 
from any shyness of the hermit or reluctance to leave her 
home, but simply because she would gladly have yielded to 
them all. " Such a nuisance one can't be in two places at 
once, like a bird ! " she remarked to me. 

In this relation, her attitude to country life was droll. 
After long indulgence in her amazing social energy in 
London, she would suddenly become tired. The pheno- 
menon never ceased to surprise her ; she could not recollect 
that she had been tired before, and this must be the end of 
all things. She would fly to the country ; to Dorsetshire, 
to Norfolk, to Haslemere, to what she called " the sober- 
ness of Ascot." Then would come letters describing the 
bliss of rural calm. " Here I am ! Just in time to save 
my life. For the future, no clothes and early hours." That 
lasted a very short while. Then a letter signed " Your 
recluse, D. N.," would show the dawn of a return to nature. 
Then boutades of increasing vehemence would mark the 
rising impatience. Sept 12 : " How dreadful it is that the 
country is so full of ladies." Sept. 15 : "I am surrounded 
by tall women and short women, all very tiresome." Sept. 
20 : " So dull here, except for one pleasant episode of a 
drunken housemaid." Sept. 23 : " Oh ! I am so longing 
for the flesh-pots of dear dirty old London " ; and then one 
knew that her return to Charles Street would not be long 
delayed. She was very fond indeed of country life; for a 
short time, and she was interested in gardens, but she really 
preferred streets. " Eridge is such a paradise — especially 
the quadrupeds," she once wrote to me from a house in 
which she found peculiar happiness. But she liked bipeds 
best. 

However one may postpone the question, sooner or later 
it is necessary to consider the quality of Lady Dorothy 
NevilTs wit, since all things converge in her to that. But 
her wit is so difficult to define that it is not surprising that 



1 88 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



one avoids, as long as possible, coming actually to grips with 
it. We may lay the foundation of a formula, perhaps, by 
saying that it was a compound of solid good sense and an 
almost reckless whimsicality of speech. The curious thing 
about it was that it was not markedly intellectual, and still 
less literary. It had not the finish of such wit as is preserved 
in anthologies of humour. Every one who enjoyed the 
conversation of Lady Dorothy must have perceived with 
annoyance how little he could take away with him. Her 
phrases did not often recur to please that inward ear, 
" which is the bliss of solitude/' What she said seemed at 
the time to be eminently right and sane ; it was exhilarating 
to a high degree; it was lighted up by merriment, and 
piquancy, and salt ; but it was the result of a kind of magic 
which needed the wand of the magician ; it could not be 
reproduced by an imitator. It is very unfortunate, but 
the fact has to £>e faced. When we tell our grandchildren 
that Lady Dorothy Nevill was the finest female wit of her 
age, they will ask us for examples other talent, and we shall 
have very few to give. 

She liked to discuss people better than books or politics 
or principles, although she never shrank from these. But 
it was what she said about human beings that kept her 
interlocutors hanging on her lips. She made extraordinarily 
searching strictures on persons, without malice, but without 
nonsense of any kind. Her own favourites were treated 
with reserve in this respect : it w r as as though they were 
put in a pen by themselves, not to be criticised so long as 
they remained in favour ; and she was not capricious, was, 
on the contrary, conspicuously loyal. But they always 
had the impression that it was only by special licence that 
they escaped the criticism that every one else was subjected 
to. Lady Dorothy Nevill was a stringent observer, and 
no respecter of persons. She carried a bow, and shot at 
folly as it flew, But I particularly wish to insist on the fact 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 189 



that her arrows, though they were feathered, were not 
poisoned. 

Light was thrown on the nature of Lady Dorothy's wit 
by her correspondence. She could in no accepted sense be 
called a good letter-writer, although every now and then 
brilliantly amusing phrases occurred in her letters. I doubt 
whether she ever wrote one complete epistle; her corre- 
spondence consisted of tumultuous, reckless, sometimes 
extremely confused and incorrect notes, which, however, 
repeated — for those who knew how to interpret her language 
— the characteristics of her talk. She took no pains with 
her letters, and was under no illusion about their epistolary 
value. Jn fact, she was far too conscious of their lack of 
form, and would sign them, " Your incompetent old friend " ; 
there was generally some apology for " this ill- written 
nonsense/' or " what stuff this is, not worth your reading ! " 
She once wrote to me : "I should like to tell you all about 
it, but alas ! old Horace Walpole's talent has not descended 
on me." Unfortunately, that was true; so far as literary 
expression and the construction of sentences went, it had 
not. Her correspondence could never be given to the 
world, because it would need to be so much revised and 
expanded and smoothed out that it would no longer be hers 
at all. 

Nevertheless, her reckless notes were always delightful to 
receive, because they gave the person to whom they were 
addressed a reflection of the writer's mood at the moment. 
They were ardent and personal, in their torrent of broken 
sentences, initials, mis-spelt names and nouns that had 
dropped their verbs. They were not so good as her talk, 
but they were like enough to it to be highly stimulating 
and entertaining ; and in the course of them phrases would 
be struck out, like sparks from flint, which were nearly as 
good, and of the very same quality, as the things she used to 
say. She wrote her letters on a fantastic variety of strangely 



190 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



coloured paper, pink and blue and snuff-brown, violet 
and green and grey, paper that was stamped with patterns 
like a napkin, or frilled like a lace handkerchief, or embossed 
with forget-me-nots like a child's valentine. She had tricks 
of time-saving; always put " 1" for 11 one," and "x" for 
" cross/' a word which she, who was never cross, loved to 
use. " I did not care for any of the guests; we seemed to 
live in a storm of x questions and crooked answers/' she 
would write, or " I am afraid my last letter was rather x." 

Lady Dorothy, as a letter-writer, had no superstitious 
reverence for the parts of speech. Like M. Bergeret, she 
" se moquait de l'orthographie comme une chose mepris- 
able." The spelling in her tumultuous notes threw a light 
upon that of very fine ladies in the seventeenth century. 
She made no effort to be exact, and much of her correspond- 
ence was made obscure by initials, which she expected her 
friends to interpret by divination. From a withering 
denunciation of the Government she expressly excepts 
Mr. John Burns and " that much-abused Mr. Birhell, whom 
I like/' From about 1899 to I 9°3» I think that Lord 
Wolseley was the friend who occupied most of her thoughts. 
In her letters of those years the references to him are in- 
cessant, but when he is not " the F.M." and " our C.C.," 
she rings the changes on all possible forms of his name, from 
" Wollesley " to " Wakey." When she wrote to me of the 
pleasure she had had in meeting " the Abbot Guaschet," 
it took me a moment to recognise the author of English 
Monastic Life. She would laugh herself at her spelling, and 
would rebut any one who teased her about it by saying, 
" Oh ! What does it matter? I don't pretend to be a 
bright specimen — like you ! " When she made arrange- 
ments to come to see me at the House of Lords, which she 
frequently did, she always wrote it " the Lord's House," 
as though it were a conventicle. 

One curious observation which the recipient of hundreds 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 191 



of her notes is bound to make, is the remarkable contrast 
between the general tone of them and the real disposition 
of their writer. Lady Dorothy Nevill in person was placid, 
indulgent, and calm; she never raised her voice, or chal- 
lenged an opinion, or asserted her individuality. She 
played, very consistently, her part of the amused and atten- 
tive spectator in the theatre of life. But in her letters she 
pretended to be, or supposed herself called upon to seem, 
passionate and distracted. They are all twinkling with 
humorous or petulant exaggeration. She happens to forget 
an engagement, which was of no sort of importance, and 
this is how she apologises : — 

" To think that every hour since you said you would come 
I have repeated to myself — Gosse at 5, Gosse at 5, and then 
after all to go meandering off and leaving you to cuss and 
swear on the doorstep, and you will never come again now, 
really. No punishment here or hereafter will be too much 
for me. Lead me to the Red Hill Asylum, and leave me 
there." 

This was written nearly twenty years ago, and she was 
not less vivacious until the end. Lord Lansdowne tells me 
of an anonymous letter which he once received, to which 
she afterwards pleaded guilty. A cow used to be kept at 
the back of Lansdowne House, and the animal, no doubt 
feeling lonely, was in the habit of lowing at all sorts of hours. 
The letter, which was supposed to voice the complaint of 
the neighbours in Charles Street, was couched in the broadest 
Wiltshire dialect, and ended with the postscript : " Dang 
'un, there 'ee goes again ! " As a matter of fact, her letters, 
about which she had no species of vanity or self-conscious- 
ness, were to her merely instruments of friendship. There 
was an odd mingling of affection and stiffness in them. 
She marshalled her acquaintances with them, and almost 
invariably they were concerned with arrangements for 
meeting or explanations of absence. In my own experience, 



192 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



I must add that she made an exception when her friends 
were abroad, when she took considerable pains to tell them 
the gossip, often in surprising terms. I was once regaled 
with her experiences as the neighbour of a famous African 

magnate, and with the remark, " Mrs. ," a London 

fine lady of repute, " has been here, and has scraped the 

whole inside out of Mr. , and gone her way rejoicing." 

Nor did she spare the correspondent himself : — 

" Old Dr. has been here, and tells me he admires 

you very much ; but I believe he has lost his memory, and 
he never had good taste at any time." 

This was not a tribute which self-esteem could hug to its 
bosom. Of a very notorious individual she wrote to me : — 

" I thought I should never be introduced to him, and I 
had to wait 100 years, but everything is possible in the best 
of worlds, and he was very satisfactory at last." Satis- 
factory ! No word could be more characteristic on the pen 
of Lady Dorothy. To be " satisfactory," whether you were 
the President of the French Republic or Lord Wolseley or 
the Human Elephant (a pathetic freak in whom she took a 
great interest), was to perform on the stage of life, in her 
unruffled presence, the part which you had been called upon 
by Providence to fill. Even a criminal might be " satis- 
factory" if he did his job thoroughly. The only entirely 
unsatisfactory people were those who were insipid, conven- 
tional, and empty. " The first principle of society should be 
to extinguish the bores," she once said. I remember going 
with her to the Zoo in 1898, and being struck with a remark 
which she made, not because it was important, but because it 
was characteristic. We were looking at the wolves, which 
she liked; and then, close by, she noticed some kind of 
Indian cow. " What a bore for the wolves to have to live 
opposite a cow ! " and then, as if talking to herself, "I do 
hate a ruminant ! " 

Her relations to literature, art, and science were specta- 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 193 



cular also. She was a sympathetic and friendly onlooker, 
always on the side of those things against the Philistines, 
but not affecting special knowledge herself. She was 
something of a virtuoso. She once said, " I have a passion 
for reading, but on subjects which nobody else will touch/' 
and this indicated the independence of her mind. She read 
to please herself, and to satisfy her thirst for experience. 
When our friendship began, Zola was in the act of producing 
the tremendous series of his Rougon-Macquart novels. It 
was one of our early themes of conversation. Zola was 
then an object of shuddering horror to the ordinary English 
reader. Lady Dorothy had already read L'Assotntnoir, and 
had not shrunk from it ; so I ventured to tell her of La Terre, 
which was just appearing. She wrote to me about it : " I 
have been reading Zola. He takes the varnish off rural life, 
I must say. Oh ! these horrid demons of Frenchmen know 
how to write. Even the most disgusting things they know 
how to describe poetically. I wish Zola could describe 
Haslemere with all the shops shut, rain falling, and most of 
the inhabitants in their cups. ,, She told me later — for we 
followed our Zola to Lourdes and Paris — that some young 
Oxford prig saw La Bete Humaine lying on the table at 
Charles Street, and remarked that Lady Dorothy could 
surely not be aware that that was " no book for a lady." 
She said, " I told him it was just the book for me!" 

She read Disraeli's novels over again, from time to time, 
with a renewal of sentiment. " I am dedicating my leisure 
hours to Endymion. What a charm after the beef and 
mutton of ordinary novels ! " She gradually developed a 
cult for Swinburne, whom she had once scorned; in her 
repentance after his death, she wrote : " I never hear enough 
about that genius Swinburne ! My heart warms when I 
think of him and read his poems." I think she was very 
much annoyed that he had never been a visitor at Charles 
Street. When Verlaine was in England, to deliver a 
o 



194 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 

lecture, in 1894, Lady Dorothy was insistent that, as I was 
seeing him frequently, I should bring the author of Parallele- 
mcnt to visit her. She said — I think under some illusion 
— " Verlaine is one of my pet poets, though/' she added, 
" not of this world." I was obliged to tell her that neither 
Verlaine' s clothes, nor his person, nor his habits, admitted 
of his being presented in Mayfair, and that, indeed, it was 
difficult to find a little French eating-house in Soho where 
he could be at home. She then said : " Why can't you take 
Erie to see him in this eating-house?" I had to explain 
that of the alternatives that was really the least possible. 
She was not pleased. 

Nor am I pleased with this attempt of mine to draw the 
features of our wonderful fairy friend. However I may 
sharpen the pencil, the line it makes is still too heavy. I 
feel that these anecdotes seem to belie her exquisite refine- 
ment, the rapidity and delicacy of her mental movement. 
To tell them is like stroking the wings of a moth. Above all, 
it is a matter of despair to attempt to define her emotional 
nature. Lady Dorothy _Nevill was possessed neither of 
gravity nor of pathos ; she was totally devoid of sentimen- 
tality. This made it easy for a superficial observer to refuse 
to believe that the author of so many pungent observations 
and such apparently volatile cynicism had a heart. When 
this w T as once questioned in company, one who knew her 
well replied : " Ah ! yes, she has a heart, and it is like a 
grain of mustard-seed ! " But her kindliness was shown, 
with great fidelity, to those whom she really honoured with 
her favour. I do not know whether it would be strictly 
correct to say that she had the genius of friendship, because 
that supposes a certain initiative and action which were 
foreign to Lady Dorothy's habits. But she possessed, to a 
high degree, the genius of comradeship. She held the reins 
very tightly, and she let no one escape whom she wished 
to retain. She took immense pains to preserve her friend- 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 195 



ships, and indeed became, dear creature, a little bit tyran- 
nical at last. Her notes grew to be excessively emphatic. 
She would begin a letter quite cheerfully with "Oh, you 
demon ! " or complain of " total and terrible neglect of an 
old friend ; I could fill this sheet of paper with an account of 
your misdeeds ! " She was ingenious in reproach : " I 
cannot afford to waste penny after penny, and no assets 
forthcoming/ ' or " I have only two correspondents, and one 
of them is a traitor; I therefore cease to write to you for 
ever ! " This might sound formidable, but it was only one 
of the constant surprises of her humour, and would be 
followed next day by the most placable of notelets. 

Her curiosity with regard to life spread to her benevo- 
lences, which often took somewhat the form of voyages of 
discovery. Among these her weekly excursion to the 
London Hospital, in all weathers and in every kind of cheap 
conveyance, was prominent. I have to confess that I pre- 
ferred that a visit to her should not be immediately prefaced 
by one of these adventures among the " pore dear things" 
at the hospital, because that was sure to mean the recital 
of some gruesome operation she had heard of, or the details 
of some almost equally gruesome cure. She enjoyed the 
whole experience in a way which is blank to the professional 
humanitarian, but I suspect the " pore dear things" appreci- 
ated her listening smile and sympathetic worldliness much 
more than they would have done the admonitions of a more 
conscious philanthropist. 

And, indeed, in retrospect, it is her kindliness that shines 
forth. She followed all that her friends did, everything 
that happened to those who were close to them. She liked 
always to receive the tribute of what she called my " literary 
efforts," and was ruthlessly sharp in observing announce- 
ments of them : " Publishing again, and of course no copy 
for poor old me," when not a volume had yet left the binders. 
She took up absurd little phrases with delightful camaraderie ; 



196 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



I have forgotten why at one time she took to signing herself 
" Your Koh-i-Noor," and wrote : " If I can hope to be the 
Koh-i-Noor of Mrs. Gosse's party, I shall be sure to come on 
Monday." One might go on indefinitely reviving these 
memories of her random humour and kindly whimsicality. 
But I close on a word of tenderer gravity, which I am sure 
will affect you. She had been a little tyrannical, as usual, 
and perhaps thought the tone of her persiflage rather 
excessive; a few hours later came a second note, which 
began : u You have made my life happier for me these 
last years — you, and Lady Airlie, and dearest Winifred." 
From her who never gave way to sentimentality in any form, 
and who prided herself on being as rigid as a nut-cracker, 
this was worth all the protestations of some more ebullient 
being. And there, dear Lady Burghclere, I must leave this 
poor sketch for such approval as you can bring yourself to 
give it. 

Very faithfully yours, 
Edmund Gosse. 

January 1914. 

11 

LORD CROMER AS A MAN OF LETTERS 

In the obituary notices which attended the death of 
Lord Cromer, it was necessary and proper that almost 
the whole space at the command of the writers should be 
taken up by a sketch of his magnificent work as an adminis- 
trator, or, as the cant phrase goes, " an empire-builder." 
For thirty years, during which time he advanced to be one 
of the most powerful and efficient of proconsuls, he held a 
place in the political world which arrested the popular 
imagination, and must continue to outweigh all other aspects 
of his character. Of this side of Lord Cromer's splendid 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 197 

career I am not competent to say a word. But there was 
another facet of it, one more private and individual, which 
became prominent after his retirement, I mean his intel- 
lectual and literary activity, which I had the privilege of 
observing. It would be a pity, perhaps, to let this be wholly 
submerged, and I propose to give, from my own recollection, 
some features of it. Lord Cromer was the author of six 
or seven published volumes, but these are before the 
public, and it is needless to speak much about them. 
What may be found more interesting are a few impressions 
of his attitude towards books and towards ideas. 

On the first occasion on which I met him, he was char- 
acteristic. It was some fifteen years ago, at the time when 
the brilliant young politicians who called themselves (or 
were rather ineptly called) the Hooligans had the graceful 
habit of asking some of their elders to dine with them in a 
private room of the House of Commons. At one of these 
little dinners the only guests were Lord Cromer and myself. 
I had never seen him before, and I regarded him with some 
awe and apprehension,, but no words had passed between 
us, when the division-bell rang, and our youthful hosts 
darted from the room. 

The moment we were left alone, Lord Cromer looked 
across the deserted tablecloth and said quietly, as though 
he were asking me to pass the salt, " Where is Bipontium ? " 
I was driven by sheer fright into an exercise of intelligence, 
and answered at once, " I should think it must be the Latin 
for Zweibriicken. Why?" " Oh ! I saw this afternoon 
that my edition of Diodorus Siculus was printed ex typo- 
graphia societatis Bipontince, and I couldn't imagine for 
the life of me what ' Bipontium' was. No doubt you're 
quite right." Nothing could be more characteristic of 
Lord Cromer's habit of mind than this sudden revulsion of 
ideas. His active brain needed no preparation to turn from 
subject to subject, but seemed to be always ready, at a 



198 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



moment's notice, to take up a fresh line of thought with 
ardour. What it could not endure was to be left stranded 
with no theme on which' to expatiate. In succeeding years, 
when it was often my daily enjoyment to listen to Lord 
Cromer's desultory conversation, as it leaped from subject 
to subject, I often thought of the alarming way in which 
" Bipontium " had pounced upon me at the dinner-table 
in the House of Commons. 

Some years passed before I had the privilege of renewing 
my experience of that evening. It was not until after his 
retirement from Egypt in the autumn of 1907 that I saw 
him again, and not then for some months. He returned, 
it will be remembered, in broken health. He used to say 
that when King Edward VII. wrote out to Cairo, strongly 
pressing him to stay, he had replied, in the words of 
Herodotus, " I am too old, oh King, and too inactive; so 
bid thou one of the younger men here to do these things." 
He very soon, however, recovered elasticity of mind and 
body when the load of office was removed from his shoulders, 
and " inactive" was the last epithet which could ever be 
applied to Lord Cromer. He began to attend the House 
of Lords, but, like a wise man, he was in no hurry to speak 
there till he had grown accustomed to the tone of the place. 
His earliest utterance (I may note the date, February 6th, 
1908) we listened to with equal respect and curiosity; 
this was a new element from which much enjoyment might 
be expected. 

This maiden speech was not long, but it produced a 
very happy impression. The subject was the Anglo- 
Russian Convention, of which the orator cordially approved, 
and I recall that a certain sensation was caused by Lord 
Cromer's dwelling on the dangers of the Pan-Islamite 
intrigues in Egypt. This is the sort of thing that the 
House of Lords enjoys — a man of special knowledge 
speaking, almost confidentially, of matters within his 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 199 



professional competency. During that year and the next 
Lord Cromer spoke with increasing frequency. There 
were great differences of opinion with regard to his efficiency 
in Parliament. I may acknowledge that I was not an un- 
measured admirer of his oratory. When he rose from his 
seat on the Cross-bench, and advanced towards the table, 
with a fine gesture of his leonine head, sympathy was always 
mingled with respect. His independence and his honesty 
were patent, and his slight air of authority satisfactory. 
His public voice was not unpleasing, but when he was tired 
it became a little veiled, and he had the sad trick of dropping 
it at the end of his sentences. I confess that I sometimes 
found it difficult to follow what he was saying, and I do 
not think that he understood how to fill a large space with 
his voice. He spoke as a man accustomed to wind up the 
debates of a council sitting round a table, rather than as a 
senator addressing the benches of Parliament. 

He was interested in the art of eloquence, and fond of 
criticising in private the methods of other speakers. He 
had a poor opinion of much studied oratory, and used to 
declare that no one had ever convinced him by merely 
felicitous diction. Perhaps he did not sufficiently realise 
that his own strength of purpose offered rather a granitic 
surface to persuasion. But no doubt he was right in saying 
that, coming as he did from the florid East, he found 
English eloquence more plain and businesslike than he 
left it. He used to declare that he never spoke impromptu 
if he could possibly help doing so, and he made great fun 
of the statesmen who say, " Little did I think when I 
came down to this House to-day that I should be called 
upon to speak," and then pour out by heart a Corinthian 
discourse. Lord Cromer always openly and frankly 
prepared his speeches, and I have seen him entranced in 
the process. As he always had a classical reference for 
everything he did, he was in the habit of mentioning that 



2oo Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Demosthenes also was unwilling to " put his faculty at the 
mercy of Fortune. 

He became an habitual attendant at the House of Lords, 
and, while it was sitting, he usually appeared in the Library 
about an hour before the House met. He took a very lively 
interest in what was going on, examining new books, and 
making a thousand suggestions. If the Lords' Library 
contains to-day one of the most complete collections of 
Latin and Greek literature in the country, this is largely 
due to the zeal of Lord Cromer, who was always egging me 
on to the purchase of fresh rarities. He was indefatigable 
in kindness, sending me booksellers' catalogues in which 
curious texts were recorded, and scouring even Paris and 
Leipzig in our behalf. When I entered into this sport so 
heartily as to provide the Greek and Latin Fathers also for 
their Lordships, Lord Cromer became unsympathetic. He 
had no interest whatever in Origen or Tertullian, and I think 
it rather annoyed him to recall that several of these oracles 
of the early Church had written in Greek. Nothing in 
history or philosophy or poetry which the ancient world 
had handed down to us came amiss to Lord Cromer, but 
I think he considered it rather impertinent of the Fathers 
to have presumed to use the language of Attica. He had 
not an ecclesiastical mind. 

Lord Cromer's familiar preoccupation with the classics 
was a point in his mental habits which deserves particular 
attention. I have always supposed that he inherited it 
from his mother, the Hon. Mrs. Baring, who was a Windham. 
She was a woman of learning ; and she is said to have dis- 
comfited Sir William Harcourt at a dinner-table by quoting 
Lucan in direct disproof of a statement about the Druids 
which he had been rash enough to advance. She sang the 
odes of Anacreon to her son in his infancy, and we may 
conjecture that she sowed in his bosom the seeds of his love 
of antiquity. Lord Cromer made no pretension to be what 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 201 



is called an " exact" scholar, but I think it is a mistake 
to say, as has been alleged, that he did not take up the study 
of Latin and Greek until middle life. It is true that he 
enjoyed no species of university training, but passed from 
Woolwich straight into the diplomatic service. In 1861, 
at the age of twenty, he was appointed A.D.C. to Sir Henry 
Storks in the Ionian Islands, and I believe that one of the 
first things he did was to look about for an instructor in 
ancient Greek. He found one in a certain Levantine in 
Corfu, whose name was Romano, and their studies opened 
with the odes of Anacreon. Whether this was a coincidence, 
or a compliment to Mrs. Baring, I do not know. This is a 
rather different account from what Lord Cromer gave in 
the preface to his Paraphrases, but I report it on his own 
later authority. 

If his scholarship was not professorial, it was at least 
founded upon a genuine and enduring love of the ancient 
world. I suppose that for fifty years, after the episode in 
Corfu, however busy he was, however immersed in Imperial 
policy, he rarely spent a day without some communing 
with antiquity. He read Latin, and still more Greek, not 
in the spirit of a pedant or a pedagogue, but genuinely for 
pleasure and refreshment. He had no vanity about it, 
and if he had any doubt as to the meaning of a passage he 
would " consult the crib/' as he used to say. We may 
conjecture further that he did not allow his curiosity to be 
balked by the barrier of a hopelessly obscure passage, but 
leaped over it, and went on. He always came back to 
Homer, whom he loved more than any other writer of the 
world, and particularly to the Iliad, which I think he knew 
nearly by heart. But he did not, as some pundits consider 
dignified and necessary, confine himself to the reading of 
the principal classics in order to preserve a pure taste. 
On the contrary, Lord Cromer, especially towards the close 
of his life, pushed up into all the byways of the Silver Age. 



202 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



As he invariably talked about the books he happened to be 
reading, it was easy to trace his footsteps. Eight or nine 
years ago he had a sudden passion for Empedocles, whose 
fragments he had found collected and translated by Mr. 
Leonard, an American. Lord Cromer used to march into 
the Library, and greet me by calling out, " Do you know? 
Empedocles says" something or other, probably some 
parallelism with a modern phrase, the detection of which 
always particularly amused Lord Cromer. 

In 1908 he took a fancy to Theognis, whose works I 
procured for him at the House of Lords, since he happened 
not to possess that writer at 36 Wimpole Street. He would 
settle himself in an armchair in the smoking-room, his eyes 
close to the book, and plunge into those dark waters of the 
gnomic elegist. He loved maxims and the expression of 
principles, and above all, as I have said, the discovery of 
identities of thought between the modern and the ancient 
world. He was delighted when he found in Theognis the 
proverb about having an ox on the tongue. I suppose this 
was quite well known to the learned, but the charm of the 
matter for Lord Cromer was that he was not deterred by 
any fear of academic criticism, and found out these things 
for himself. He read Theognis as other people read 
Rudyard Kipling, for stimulus and pleasure. He swept 
merely ' ' scholarly " questions aside. He read his Iliad 
like a love-letter, but he was bored to death by discussions 
about the authorship of the Homeric epics. 

In one matter, the serene good sense which was so 
prominently characteristic of Lord Cromer tinged his 
attitude towards the classics. He was not at all like 
Thomas Love Peacock, who entreated his friends to desist 
from mentioning anything that had happened in the world 
for the last 2,000 years. On the contrary, Lord Cromer 
was always bent on binding the old and the new together. 
It was very noticeable in his conversation that he was 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 203 



fond of setting classic instances side by side with modern 
ones. If books dealt with this parallelism, they exercised 
a charm over Lord Cromer's imagination which may some- 
times have led him a little astray about their positive value. 
I recall a moment when he was completely under the sway 
of M. Ferrero's Greatness and Decline of Rome, largely 
because of the pertinacity with which the Italian historian 
compares Roman institutions with modern social arrange- 
ments. It was interesting to the great retired proconsul 
to discover that Augustus " considered that in the majority 
of cases subject peoples had to be governed through their 
own national institutions." It is scarcely necessary to 
point out that these analogies form the basis of what is, 
perhaps, Lord Cromer's most important late essay, his 
Ancient and Modem Imperialism. 

In a practical administration of India and Egypt, those 
oceans of unplumbed antiquity, the ordinary British official 
has neither time nor taste to do more than skim the surface 
of momentary experience. But Lord Cromer had always 
been acutely aware of the mystery of the East, and always 
looked back into the past with deep curiosity. Sometimes 
the modern life in Egypt, exciting as it was, almost seemed 
to him a phantasmagoria dancing across the real world of 
Rameses. This tendency of thought coloured one branch 
of his reading; he could not bear to miss a book which 
threw any light on the social and political manners of 
antiquity. Works like Fowler's Social Life at Rome or 
Marquardt's Le Culte chez les Romains thrilled him with 
excitement and animated his conversation for days. He 
wanted, above all things, to realise how the ancients lived 
and what feelings actuated their behaviour. On one 
occasion, in a fit of gaiety, I ventured to tell him that he 
reminded me of Mrs. Blimber (in Dombey and Son), who 
could have died contented had she visited Cicero in his 
retirement at beautiful Tusculum. " Well ! " replied Lord 



204 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Cromer, laughing, " and a very delightful visit that would 
be." 

In the admirable appreciation contributed to the Times 
by " C." (our other proconsular " C." I) it was remarked 
that the " quality of mental balance is visible in all that 
Lord Cromer wrote, whether in his official despatches, his 
published books, or his private correspondence." It was 
audible, too, in his delightful conversation, which was 
vivid, active, and yet never oppressive. He spoke with the 
firm accent of one accustomed to govern, but never 
dictatorially. His voice was a very agreeable one, supple 
and various in its tones, neither loud nor low. Although he 
had formed the life-long habit of expressing his opinions 
with directness, he never imposed them unfairly, or took 
advantage of his authority. On the contrary, there was 
something extremely winning in his eagerness to hear the 
reply of his interlocutor. " Well, there's a great deal in 
that," he would graciously and cordially say, and proceed 
to give the opposing statement what benefit he thought it 
deserved. He could be very trenchant, but I do not think 
that any one whom he had advanced to the privilege of his 
confidence can remember that he was so to a friend. 

The attitude of Lord Cromer to life and letters— I speak, 
of course, only of what I saw in the years of his retirement 
from office— was not exactly representative of our own or 
even of the last century. He would have been at home in 
the fourth quarter of "the eighteenth century, before the 
French Revolution. I judge him to have been born with 
an inflexible and commanding character, which in the 
person of many men exposed to such dangerous successes 
as he enjoyed might have degenerated into tyranny. On 
Lord Cromer, on the other hand, time produced a humanis- 
ing and mellowing effect. It may very well prove that he 
has stamped his mark on the East of the twentieth century, 
as Turgot did his on the West of the nineteenth century ; 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 205 



but without straying into the perilous fields of prophecy, 
we are safe in recording the impression that Lord Cromer 
was not altogether a man of to-day; he looked forward 
and he looked backward. Probably the nearest counter- 
part to his manner of mind and conversation may be found 
in the circle of whom we read in the Diary of Fanny Burney. 
We can conceive Lord Cromer leaning against the Com- 
mittee Box in earnest conversation with Mr. Windham 
and Mr. Burke at Warren Hastings' trial. We can restore 
the half-disdainful gesture with which he would drop an 
epigram (" from the Greek '*) into the Bath Easton Vase. 
His politeness and precision, his classical quotations, his 
humour, his predilections in literature and art, were those 
of the inner circle of Whigs nearly a century and a half 
ago, and I imagine that their talk was very much like his. 

He was fond of repeating Bagehot's description of the 
Whigs, and it seems to me to apply so exactly to himself 
that I will quote part of it : — 

" Perhaps as long as there has been a political history 
in this country there have been certain men of a cool, 
moderate, resolute firmness, not gifted with high imagina- 
tion, little prone to enthusiastic sentiment, heedless of 
large theories and speculations, careless of dreamy sceptic- 
ism, with a clear view of the next step, and a wise intention 
to take it ; a strong conviction that the elements of know- 
ledge are true, and a steady belief that the present would, 
can, and should be quietly improved" 

In a full analysis of Lord Cromer's character, I think 
that every clause of this description might be expanded 
with illustrations. In the intellectual domain, Bagehot's 
words, " little prone to enthusiastic sentiment/ ' seem 
made 'to fit Lord Cromer's detachment from all the ten- 
dencies of romanticism. His literary tastes were highly 



206 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



developed and eagerly indulged, but they were all in their 
essence pre-Revolutionary. Those who are familiar with 
a book once famous, the Diary of a Lover of Literature of 
Thomas Green, written down to the very end of the 
eighteenth century, have in their hands a volume in which 
the very accents of Lord Cromer may seem to be heard. 
Isaac d' Israeli said that Green had humbled all modern 
authors in the dust ; Lord Cromer had a short way with 
many of the writers most fashionable at this moment. 
When he was most occupied with the resuscitations of 
ancient manners, of which I have already spoken, I found 
to my surprise that he had never read Marius the Epicurean. 
I recommended it to him, and with his usual instant 
response to suggestion, he got it at once and began reading 
it. But I could not persuade him to share my enthusiasm, 
and, what was not like him, he did not read Marius to 
the end. The richness and complication of Pater's style 
annoyed him. He liked prose to be clear and stately ; he 
liked it, in English, to be Addisonian. Even Gibbon — 
though he read The Decline and Fall over again, very 
carefully, so late as 1913 — was not entirely to his taste. 
He enjoyed the limpidity and the irony, but the sustained 
roll of Gibbon's antitheses vexed him a little. He liked 
prose to be quite simple. 

In many ways, Lord Cromer, during those long and 
desultory conversations about literature which will be so 
perennial a delight to look back upon, betrayed his con- 
stitutional detestation of the Romantic attitude. He 
believed himself to be perfectly catholic in his tastes, and 
resented the charge of prejudice. But he was, in fact, 
irritated by the excesses and obscurities of much that is 
fashionable to-day in the world of letters, and he refused 
his tribute of incense to several popular idols. He thought 
that, during the course of the nineteenth century, German 
influences had seriously perturbed the balance of taste in 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 207 



Europe. I do not know that Lord Cromer had pursued 
these impressions very far, or that he had formed any 
conscious theory with regard to them. But he was very 
" eighteenth century " in his suspicion of enthusiasm, and 
I always found him amusingly impervious to ideas of a 
visionary or mystical order. It was impossible that so 
intelligent and omnivorous a reader as he should not be 
drawn to the pathetic figure of Pascal, but he was puzzled 
by him. He described him as " manifestly a man full of 
contrasts, difficult to understand, and as many-sided as 
Odysseus." On another occasion, losing patience with 
Pascal, he called him " a half-lunatic man of genius." 
Fenelon annoyed him still more ; the spiritual experiences 
of the Archbishop of Cambrai he found " almost incom- 
prehensible." His surprising, but after all perfectly con- 
sistent, comment on both Fenelon and Pascal was, " How 
much more easy Buff on is to understand ! " 

He recommended all young men who intend to take a 
part in politics carefully to study pre-Revolutionary history, 
and one of his objections to the romantic literature of 
Rousseau downwards was that it did not help such study. 
It was too individualistic in its direction. It tended, 
moreover, Lord Cromer thought, to disturb the balance of 
judgment, that " level-headedness " which he valued so 
highly, and had exercised with such magnificent authority. 
He disliked the idea that genius involved a lack of sanity, 
or, in other words, of self-command. He regretted that 
Dryden had given general currency to this idea by his 
famous lines in Absalom and Achitophel : — 

" Great wits are sure to madness near allied, 
And thin partitions do their bounds divide ; ' ' 

but Lord Cromer was himself, perhaps, too ready to account 
by insanity for every odd or confused expression in literature. 
He had nothing to say about Mazzini, whom he swept aside 



208 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



impatiently, except that he " was a semi-lunatic," and I 
have heard him declare of Chatterton and Verlaine — a 
strange couple — that they were a pair of madmen. He 
objected violently to Baudelaire, but I think he knew very 
little about that poet's works. 

If I mention these things, it is because they seem to be 
necessary to give human character to any sketch of the 
mind of Lord Cromer. He himself hated mere eulogy, 
which he said had ruined most of the biographies of the 
world. The official lives of Disraeli and Gladstone did not 
escape a measure of his blame in this respect, and it will be 
recalled that resentment against what he thought a shadow- 
less portrait led to his own very vivacious paper on Disraeli, 
which he afterwards issued as a pamphlet. He was an avid 
reader of memoirs, and of political memoirs in particular, 
but he almost always passed upon them the same criticism 

— that they were too public. " I don't want Mr. ," 

he would say, " to tell me what I can learn for myself by 
turning up the file of the Morning Post. I want him to tell 
me what I can't find out elsewhere. And he need not be 
so very much afraid of hinting that his hero had faults, 
for if he had not had defects we should never have heard 
of his qualities. We are none of us perfect, and we don't 
want a priggish biographer to pretend that we are." He 
was speaking here mainly of political matters; but Lord 
Cromer's training and experience had a strong bearing on 
his literary tastes. With him politics reacted on literature, 
although he liked to fancy that he kept them wholly apart. 

No doubt a selection from his correspondence will one 
day be given to the world, for he was a vivid, copious, and 
daring letter-writer. I suppose that he wrote to each of 
his friends mainly on the subject which absorbed that 
friend most, and as his own range of sympathies and 
interests was very wide, it is probable that his letters will 
prove excellent general reading. As in so many other of 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 209 



the departments of life, Lord Cromer did not think letter- 
writing a matter to be lightly regarded or approached 
without responsibility. He said : — 

" There are two habits which I have contracted, and 
which I have endeavoured to pass on to my children, as 
I have found them useful. One is to shut the door after 
me when I leave the room, and the other is always to affix 
the day of the month and the year to every document, 
however unimportant, that I sign. I have received num- 
bers of letters, not only from women, one of whose numerous 
privileges it is to be vague, but also from men in high 
official positions, dated with the day of the week only. 
When the document is important, such a proceeding is a 
fraud on posterity/ 1 

He often, both in conversation and in letters, took up 
one of his favourite classic tags, and wove a shrewd modern 
reflection round it. For instance, a couple of years before 
the war, a phrase of Aristotle recommending a ruthless 
egotism in the conduct of war, led him to say : — 

" I think that at times almost every modern nation has 
acted on this principle, though they gloss it over with fine 
words. Its principal exponents of late have unquestionably 
been the Hohenzollerns." 

And, in connection with the axiom of Thucydides that 
war educates through violence, he wrote, about the same 
time : — 

" The Germans, who, in spite of their culture, preserve 
2t strain of barbarism in their characters, are the modern 
representatives of this view. There is just this amount of 
truth in it — that at the cost of undue and appalling 
p 



2io Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



sacrifices, war brings out certain fine qualities in individuals, 
and sometimes in nations." 

This may, surely, be taken as a direct prophecy of the 
magnificent effort of France. Lord Cromer's reflections, 
thrown off in the warmth of personal contact, often had a 
pregnant directness. For instance, how good this is : — 

" The prejudice against the Boeotians was probably in 
a large measure due to the fact that, as the late Lord 
Salisbury might have said, they ' put their money on the 
wrong horse 1 during the Persian war. So also, it may be 
observed, did the oracle at Delphi/' 

Lord Cromer's public speeches and published writings 
scarcely give a hint of his humour, which was lambent and 
sometimes almost boyish. He loved to be amused, and he 
repaid his entertainer by being amusing. I suppose that 
after his return from Cairo he allowed this feature of his 
character a much freer run. The legend used to be that he 
was looked upon in Egypt as rather grim, and by no means 
to be trifled with. He was not the man, we may be sure, 
to be funny with a Young Turk, or to crack needless jokes 
with a recalcitrant Khedive. But retirement softened 
him, and the real nature of Lord Cromer, with its elements 
of geniality and sportiveness, came into full play. 

Eight years ago, I regret to admit, Mr. Lloyd George 
was not the universal favourite in the House of Lords that 
he has since become. Lord Cromer was one of those who 
were not entirely reconciled to the financial projects of 
the new Chancellor of the Exchequer. He compared the 
Chancellor with Pescennius Niger, 

" who aspired to be Emperor after the death of Pertinax, 
and was already Governor of Syria. On being asked by 
the inhabitants of that province to diminish the land tax, 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 2 1 1 



he replied that, so far as he was concerned, not only would 
he effect no diminution, but he regretted that he could 
not tax the air which they breathed.' ' 

The strained relations between Mr. Lloyd George and the 
House of Lords inspired Lord Cromer with a really delightful 
parallel from Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel (which, by 
the way, was one of his favourite poems ) : — 

" Thus, worn or weakened, well or ill content, 
Submit they must to David's government ; 
Impoverished and deprived of all command, 
Their taxes doubled as they lost their land ; 
And — what was harder yet to flesh and blood, 
Their gods disgraced, and burnt like common wood." 

When he pointed this out to me, I entreated him to 
introduce it into a speech on the Budget. But he said that 
he was not sure of his audience, and then it was most 
painful to an orator to make a literary reference which was 
not taken up. Once at Sheffield, when he was urging the 
necessity of a strong Navy upon a large public meeting, 
he quoted Swinburne's splendid lines : — 

" All our past comes wailing in the wind, 
And all our future thunders on the sea," 

without producing any effect at all. But the House of 
Lords is not an illiterate audience, and I recollect that on 
one occasion, when Lord Cromer himself was speaking on 
preferential treatment for the Colonies, and quoted Prior : — 

" Euphemia (that is Preference) serves to grace my measure. 
But Chloe (that is Protection) is my real flame," 

the Peers received the couplet with hilarious appreciation. 

He was very entertaining about the oddities of his life 
in the East, and his stories were numberless. One was of a 
petition which he once received from a young Egyptian 
with a grievance, which opened with these words : — 



212 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



" Hell ! Lordship's face grow red when he hear quite 
beastly behaviour of Public Works Department towards 

his humble servant." 

He used to repeat these things with an inimitable chuckle 

of enjoyment. 

We have been told that he who blows through bronze 
may breathe through silver. The severe preoccupations 
of Lord Cromer's public life did not prevent him from 
sedulously cultivating the art of verse. In 1903, before 
his retirement from Egypt, he published a volume of 
Paraphrases and Translations from the Greek, in the pre- 
paration or selection of which I believe that he enjoyed 
the advice of Mr. Mackail. It was rather unlucky that, 
with a view to propitiate the angry critics, Lord Cromer 
prefixed to this little book a preface needlessly modest. 
He had no cause to apologise so deeply for exercises which 
were both elegant and learned. It is a curious fact that, 
in this collection of paraphrases, the translator did not 
touch the Attic authors whom he knew so well — he used to 
copy out pages of iEschylus and Sophocles in his loose 
Greek script, with notes of his own — but dealt entirely 
with lyric and epigrammatic poets of the Alexandrian age. 
Perhaps it seemed to him less daring to touch them than to 
affront /Eschylus. He was not quite sure about these 
verses of his ; he liked them, and then he was afraid that 
they were unworthy of the original. Out in Cairo it was so 
difficult, he said, to get a critical opinion. 

Among his unpublished translations there is one, from a 
fragment of Euripides, which should not be lost, if only 
because Lord Cromer himself liked it better than any 
other of his versions. It runs : — 

" I learn what may be taught ; 
I seek what may be sought ; 
My other wants I dare 
To ask from Heaven in prayer." 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 213 



Of his satirical vers-de-societe , which it amused him to 
distribute in private, he never, I believe, gave any to the 
world, but they deserve preservation. Some serious 
reflections on the advantages of the British occupation of 
Egypt close with the quotation : — 

" Let them suffice for Britain's need — 
No nobler prize was ever won — 
The blessings of a people freed, 
The consciousness of duty done." 

These were, in a high degree, the rewards of Lord Cromer 
himself. 

After his settlement in London, Mr. T. E. Page sent him 
a book, called Between Whiles, of English verse translated 
into Latin and Greek. Lord Cromer was delighted with 
this, and the desire to write in metre returned to him. He 
used to send his friends, in letters, little triolets and epi- 
grams, generally in English, but sometimes in Greek. But 
he was more ambitious than this. So lately as February 
191 1, during the course of one of our long conversations 
upon literature, he asked me to suggest a task of trans- 
lation on which he could engage. It was just the moment 
when he was particularly busy with Constitutional Free 
Trade and Woman Suffrage and other public topics, but 
that made no difference. It had always seemed to me that 
he had been most happy in his versions of the Bucolic 
poets, and so I urged him to continue his translations by 
attempting the Europa of Moschus. He looked at it, and 
pronounced it unattractive. I was therefore not a little 
surprised to receive a letter, on March 25th, in which he 
said : — 

" Not sleeping very well last night, I composed in my 
head these few lines merely as a specimen to begin Europa 

" When dawn is nigh, at the third watch of night, 
What time! more sweet than honey of. the bee, 



214 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Sleep courses through the brain some vision bright, 

To lift the veil which hides futurity, 
Fair Cypris sent a fearful dream to mar 

The slumbers of a maid whose frightened eyes 
Pictured the direful clash of horrid war, 

And she, Europa, was the victor's prize." 

" They are, of course, only a first attempt, and I do not 
think much of them myself. But do you think the sort 

of style and metre suitable? " 

He went steadily on till he completed the poem, and on 
April 27th I received a packet endorsed " Patched-up 
Moschus returned herewith." So far as I know, this 
version of the Europa, conducted with great spirit in his 
seventieth year, has never been published. It is the 
longest and most ambitious of all his poetical experiments. 

Lord Cromer was fond of saying that he considered the 
main beauty of Greek poetry to reside in its simplicity. In 
all his verses he aimed at limpidity and ease. He praised 
the Greek poets for not rhapsodising about the beauties 
of nature, and this was very characteristic of his own 
eighteenth-century habit of mind. His general attitude 
to poetry, which he read incessantly and in four languages, 
was a little difficult to define. He was ready to give lists 
of his life-long prime favourites, and, as was very natural, 
these differed from time to time. But one list of the books 
he had " read more frequently than any other* ' consisted 
of the Iliad, the Book of Job, Tristram Shandy, and Pick- 
wick, to which he added Lycidas and the Tenth Satire of 
Juvenal. It would require a good deal of ingenuity to 
bring these six masterpieces into line. He was consistent 
in declaring that the 28th chapter of Job was " the finest 
bit of poetry ever written/ 1 

He was violently carried away in 1912 by reading Mr. 
Livingstone's book on The Greek Genius. It made him a 
little regret the pains he had expended on the Hymns of 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 215 



Callimachus and the Bucolics of Theocritus, and he thought 
that perhaps he ought to have confined himself to the 
severer and earlier classics. But surely he had followed 
his instinct, and it would have been a pity if he had narrowed 
his range. It was the modernness of the Alexandrian 
authors, and perhaps their Egyptian flavour, which had 
justly attracted him. He did not care very much for an 
antiquity which he could not revivify for his own vision. 
I urged him to read a book which had fascinated me, The 
Religion of Numa t by a learned American, the late Mr. Jesse 
Carter. Lord Cromer read it with respect, but he admitted 
that those earliest Roman ages were too remote and cold 
for him. 

Lord Cromer was very much annoyed with Napoleon 
for having laid it down that aprte soixante ans, un homme 
ne vaut rien. The rash dictum had certainly no applica- 
tion to himself. It is true that, under the strain of the 
long tropical years, his bodily health declined as he ap- 
proached the age of sixty. But his mental activity, his 
marvellous receptivity, were not merely maintained, but 
seemed steadily to advance. He continued to be con- 
sumed by that lust for knowledge, libido sciendi, which 
he admired in the ancient Greeks. When the physicians 
forbade him, four years ago, to expend his failing strength 
any longer on political and social propaganda, instead of 
retiring, as most men of his age would have done, to dream 
in the recesses of his library, he plunged with renewed 
ardour into the one occupation still permitted to him : 
literature. The accident of his publishing a criticism which 
excited wide popular attention led to his becoming, when 
past his seventieth birthday, a " regular reviewer" for the 
Spectator, where the very frequent papers signed " 
became a prominent feature. Those articles were, perhaps 
most remarkable for the light they threw on the writer's 
own temperament, on his insatiable desire for knowledge. 



2i 6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Lord Cromer's curiosity in all intellectual directions was, 
to the last, like that of a young man beginning his mental 
career; and when he adopted the position, so uncommon 
in a man of his experience and authority, of a reviewer of 
current books, it was because he wished to share with others 
the excitement he himself enjoyed in the tapping of fresh 
sources of information. 



Ill 

THE LAST DAYS OF LORD REDESDALE 

The publication of Lord Redesdale's Memories — which 
was one of the most successful autobiographies of recent 
times —familiarised thousands of readers with the principal 
adventures of a very remarkable man, but, when all was 
said and done, left an incomplete impression of his taste 
and occupations on the minds of those who were not familiar 
with his earlier writings. His literary career had been a 
very irregular one. He took up literature rather late, and 
produced a book that has become a classic — Tales of Old 
Japan. He did not immediately pursue this success, but 
became involved in public activities of many kinds, which 
distracted his attention. In his sixtieth year he brought 
out The Bamboo Garden, and from that time — until, in his 
eightieth year, he died in full intellectual energy — he 
constantly devoted himself to the art of writing. His 
zeal, his ambition, were wonderful; but it was impossible 
to overlook the disadvantage from which that ambition 
and that zeal suffered in the fact that for the first sixty years 
of his life the writer had cultivated the art but casually and 
sporadically. He retained, in spite of all the labour which 
he expended, a certain stiffness, an air of the amateur, of 
Which he himself was always acutely conscious. 



Three Experiments in 



Portraiture 



217 



This did not interfere with the direct and sincere appeal 
made to general attention by the 1915 Memories, a book 
so full of geniality and variety, so independent in its judg- 
ments and so winning in its ingenuousness, that its wider 
popularity could be the object of no surprise. But, to those 
who knew Lord Redesdale intimately, it must always 
appear that his autobiography fails to explain him from 
what we may call the subjective point of view. It tells 
us of his adventures and his friendships, of the strange 
lands he visited and of the unexpected confidences he 
received, but it does not reveal very distinctly the 
character of the writer. There is far more of his intel- 
lectual constitution, of his personal tastes and mental 
habits, in the volume of essays of 1912, called A Tragedy 
in Stone, but even here much is left unsaid and even 
unsuggested. 

Perhaps the most remarkable fact about Lord Redesdale 
was the redundant vitality of his character. His nature 
swarmed with life, like a drop of pond-water under a micro- 
scope. There cannot be found room in any one nature for 
all the qualities, and what he lacked in some degree was 
concentration. But very few men who have lived in our 
complicated age have done well in so many directions as he, 
or, aiming widely, have failed in so few. He shrank from 
no labour and hesitated before no difficulty, but pushed 
on with an extraordinary energy along many various lines 
of activity. But the two lines in which he most desired and 
most determined to excel, gardening and authorship, are 
scarcely to be discerned, except below the surface, in his 
Memories. Next to his books, what he regarded with most 
satisfaction was his wonderful garden at Batsford, and of 
this there is scarcely a word of record in the autobiography. 
He had always intended to celebrate this garden, and when 
he was preparing to return to Batsford in 1915 he wrote to 
me that he was going to write an Apologia pro fJorto meo f as 



218 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



long before he had composed one pro Bambusis tneis. A 

book which should combine with the freest fancies of his 

intellect a picture of the exotic groves of Batsford was what 
was required to round off Lord Redesdale' s literary adven- 
tures. It will be seen that he very nearly succeeded in 

thus setting the top-stone on his literary edifice. 

One reason, perhaps, why Batsford, which was ever 
present to his thoughts, is so very slightly and vaguely 
mentioned in Lord Redesdale's Memories, may be the fact 
that from 1910 onwards he was not living in it himself, 
and that it was irksome to him to magnify in print horti- 
cultural beauties which were for the time being in the posses- 
sion of others. The outbreak of the war, in which all his 
five sons were instantly engaged, was the earliest of a series 
of changes which completely altered the surface of Lord 
Redesdale's life. Batsford came once more into his personal 
occupation, and at the same time it became convenient 
to give up his London house in Kensington Court. Many 
things combined to transform his life in the early summer of 
1915. His eldest son, Major the Hon. Clement Mitford, 
after brilliantly distinguishing himself in battle, was received 
by the King and decorated, to the rapturous exultation 
of his father. Major Mitford returned to the French front, 
only to fall on May 13th, 1915. 

At this time I was seeing Lord Redesdale very frequently, 
and I could not but be struck by the effect of this blow upon 
his temperament. After the first shock of sorrow, I 
observed in him the determination not to allow himself to 
be crushed. His dominant vitality asserted itself almost 
with violence, and he seemed to clench his teeth in defiance of 
the assault on his individuality. It required on the part of 
so old a man no little fortitude, for it is easier to bear a great 
and heroic bereavement than to resist the wearing vexation 
of seeing one's system of daily occupation crumbling away. 
Lord Redesdale was pleased to be going again to Batsford, 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 219 



which had supplied him in years past with so much sump- 
tuous and varied entertainment, but it was a matter of alarm 
with him to give up all, or almost all, the various ties with 
London which had meant so much to his vividly social 
nature. 

Meanwhile, during the early months of 1915 in London, 
he had plenty of employment in finishing and revising his 
Memories, which it had taken him two years to write. This 
was an occupation which bridged over the horrid chasm 
between his old active life in London, with its thousand 
interests, and the uncertain and partly dreaded prospect 
of exile in the bamboo-gardens of a remote corner of 
Gloucestershire, where he foresaw that deafness must needs 
exclude him from the old activities of local life. 

He finished revising the manuscript of his Memories in 
July, and then went down, while the actual transference of his 
home was taking place, to the Royal Yacht Squadron Castle, 
Cowes, where he had been accustomed to spend some of the 
most enjoyable hours of his life. But this scene, habitually 
thronged with people, and palpitating with gaiety, in the 
midst of which Lord Redesdale found himself so singularly 
at home, was now, more than perhaps any other haunt of 
the English sportsman, in complete eclipse. The weather 
was lovely, but there were no yachts, no old chums, no 
charming ladies. " It is very dull," he wrote; " the sole 
inhabitant of the Club besides myself was Lord Falkland, 
and now he is gone." In these conditions Lord Redesdale 
became suddenly conscious that the activity of the last two 
or three years was over, that the aspect of his world had 
changed, and that he was in danger of losing that hold upon 
life to which he so resolutely clung. In conditions of this 
kind he always turned to seek for something mentally 
" craggy," as Byron said, and at Cowes he wonderfully 
found the writings of Nietzsche. The result is described 
in a remarkable letter to myself (July 28th ? 1915), which 



22o Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



I quote because it marks the earliest stage in the composition 

of his last unfinished book : — 

" I have been trying to occupy myself with Nietzsche, 
on the theory that there must be something great about a 
man who exercised the immense influence that he did. But 
I confess I am no convert to any of his various moods. Here 
and there I find gems of thought, but one has to wade 
through a morass of blue mud to get at them. Here is a 
capital saying of his which may be new to you — in a letter 
to his friend Rohde he writes : ' Eternally we need midwives 
in order to be delivered of our thoughts.' We cannot work 
in solitude. ' Woe to us who lack the sunlight of a friend's 
presence.' 

" How true that is ! When I come down here, I think 
that with so much time on my hands I shall be able to get 
through a pile of work. Not a bit of it 1 I find it difficult 
even to write a note. To me it is an imperative necessity 
to have the sympathetic counsel of a friend." 

The letter continued with an impassioned appeal to his 
correspondent to find some definite intellectual work for 
him to undertake. " You make me dare, and that is much 
towards winning a game. You must sharpen my wits, 
which are blunt enough just now/' In short, it was a cry 
from the island of boredom to come over the water and 
administer first-aid. 

Accordingly, I started for Cowes, and was welcomed at 
the pier with all my host's habitual and vivacious hospi- 
tality. Scarcely w r ere we seated in our wicker-chairs in 
face of the Solent, not twinkling as usual with pleasure-sails, 
but sinister with strange instruments of warfare, than he 
began the attack. " What am I to do with myself? " was 
the instant question ; " what means can I find of occupying 
this dreadful void of leisure?" To which the obvious 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 221 

reply was : " First of all, you must exhibit to me the famous 
attractions of Cowes ! " " There are none/' he replied in 
comic despair, but we presently invented some, and my 
visit, which extended over several radiant days of a perfect 
August, was diversified with walks and excursions by land 
and water, in which my companion was as active and as 
ardent as though he had been nineteen instead of seventy- 
nine. In a suit picturesquely marine, with his beautiful 
silver hair escaping from a jaunty yachting cap, he was the 
last expression of vivacity and gaiety. 

The question of his intellectual occupation in the future 
came, however, incessantly to the front ; and our long talks 
in the strange and uncanny solitude of the Royal Yacht 
Squadron Castle always came to this : What task was he 
to take up next ? His large autobiography was now coming 
back to him from the printers in packets of proof, with which 
he was closeted night and morning ; and I suggested that 
while this was going on there was no need for him to think 
about future enterprises. To tell the truth, I had regarded 
the Memories as likely to be the final labour of Lo^d Redes- 
dale' s busy life. It seemed to me that at his advanced age 
he might now well withdraw into dignified repose. I even 
hinted so much in terms as delicate as I could make them, 
but the suggestion was not well received. I became con- 
scious that there was nothing he was so little prepared to 
welcome as " repose " ; that, in fact, the terror which pos- 
sessed him was precisely the dread of having to withdraw 
from the stage of life. His deafness, which now began to 
be excessive, closed to his eager spirit so many of the avenues 
of experience, that he was more than ever anxious to keep 
clear those that remained to him, and of these, literary 
expression came to be almost the only one left. In the 
absence of a definite task his path in this direction led 
through darkness. 

But it was not until after several suggestions and many 



222 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



conversations that light was found. The friend so pressingly 

appealed to returned to London, where he was stern in 

rejecting several projects, hotly flung at his head and then 
coldly abandoned. A study of the Empress Maria Theresa, 
suggested by a feverish perusal of Pechler, was the latest 
and least attractive of these. Lord Redesdale then frankly 
demanded that a subject should be found for him. " You 
have brought this upon yourself," he said, " by encouraging 
me to write." What might prove the scheme of a very 
pleasant book then occurred to me, and I suggested to 
the fiery and impatient author, who had by this time retired 
for good to Batsford, that he should compose a volume of 
essays dealing with things in general, but bound together 
by a constantly repeated reference to his wild garden of 
bamboos and the Buddha in his secret grove. The author 
was to suppose himself seated with a friend on the terrace 
at the top of the garden, and to let the idea of the bamboo 
run through the whole tissue of reflections and reminiscences 
like an emerald thread. Lord Redesdale was enchanted, 
and the idea took fire at once. He replied : — 

" You are Orpheus, with his lute moving the rocks and 
stones ! I shall work all my conceits into your plan, and 
am now proceeding to my garden shrine to meditate on it. 
I will try to make a picture of the Veluvana, the bamboo- 
garden which was the first Yikara or monastery of Buddha 
and his disciples. There I will sit, and, looking on the 
great statue of Buddha in meditation, I shall begin to 
arrange all sorts of wild imaginings which may come into 
my crazy brain/ 1 

In this way was started the book, of which, alas ! only 
such fragments were composed as form the earlier part of 
the volume published after his death. It is, however, right 
to point out that for the too-brief remainder of his life 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 223 



Lord Redesdale was eagerly set on the scheme of which a 
hint has just been given. The Veluvana was to be the 
crowning production of his literary life, and it was to sum 
up the wisdom of the East and the gaiety of the West. 
He spoke of it incessantly, in letters and conversation. 
" That will do to go into Veluvana," was his cry when 
he met with anything rare or strange. For instance, on 
September 15th, 1915, he wrote to me : — 

" To-day, all of a sudden I was struck by the idea that 
plants, having many human qualities, may also in some 
degree have human motives — that they are not altogether 
mere automata — and as I thought, I began to imagine that 
I could detect something resembling purpose in the move- 
ments of certain plants. I have jotted down a few notes, 
and , you will see when I expand them that at any rate the 
idea calls attention to the movements themselves, some of 
which seem never to have been noticed at all, or certainly 
at best very inadequately. You will see that this brings 
in the bamboo-garden and Buddha, and so keeps to the 
scheme of Veluvana" 

The monasteries of twelfth-century Japanese Buddhism, 
which he had visited long before in the neighbourhood of 
Kioto, now recurred to his memory, and he proposed to 
describe in what a monk of Hiyeisan differed from an Indian 
Buddhist monk. This was a theme of extraordinary in- 
terest, and wholly germane to his purpose. It drove him back 
to his Japanese books, and to his friend Sir Ernest Satow's 
famous dictionary. He wrote to me : — 

"No praise can be too high for the work which Satow did 
in the early days of our intercourse with Japan. He was 
a valuable asset to England, and to Sir Harry Parkes, who, 
with all his energy and force of character, would never have 



224 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



succeeded as he did without Satow. Aston was another 

very strong man." 

These reveries were strictly in accordance with the spirit 

of Veluvana, but unfortunately what Lord Redesdale wrote 
in this direction proved to be too slight for publication. He 
met with some expressions of extremely modern Japanese 
opinion which annoyed him, and to which he was tempted 
to give more attention than they deserve. It began to be 
obvious that the enterprise was one for which great concen- 
tration of effort, and a certain serenity of purpose which was 
not to be secured at will, were imperatively needed. In 
leaving London, he was not content, and no one could 
have wished him to be willing, to break abruptly all the 
cords of his past life. He was still a Trustee of the National 
Gallery, still chairman of the Marlborough Club, still occu- 
pied with the administration of the Wallace Collection, 
and he did not abate his interest in these directions. They 
made it necessary that he should come up to town every 
other week. This made up in some measure for the inevit- 
able disappointment of finding that in Gloucestershire his 
deafness now completely cut him off from all the neighbourly 
duties which had in earlier years diversified and entertained 
his country life. He had been a great figure among the 
squires and farmers of the Cotswolds, but all this was now 
at an end, paralysed by the hopeless decay of his hearing. 
It grieved him, too, that he was unable to do any useful 
war-work in the county, and he was forced to depend upon 
his pen and his flying visits to London for refreshment. 
He was a remarkably good letter-writer, and he now de- 
manded almost pathetically to be fed with the apples of 
correspondence. He wrote (November 26th, 1915) : — 

" Your letters are a consolation for being deprived of 
taking a part any longer in the doings of the great world. 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 225 



The Country Mouse — even if the creature were able to scuttle 
back into the cellars of the great — would still be out of all 
communion with the mighty, owing to physical infirmity. 
And now comes the kind Town Mouse and tells him all 
that he most cares to know." 

He had books and his garden to enjoy, and he made the 
most of both. " I hate the autumn," he said, " for it means 
the death of the year, but I try to make the death of the 
garden as beautiful as possible." Among his plants, and 
up and down the high places of his bamboo-feathered 
rockeries, where little cascades fell with a music which he 
could no longer hear into small dark pools full of many- 
coloured water-lilies, his activity was like that of a boy. He 
had the appearance, the tastes, the instincts of vigorous 
manhood prolonged far beyond the usual limit of such gifts, 
and yet all were marred and rendered bankrupt for him 
by the one intolerable defect, the deafness which had by 
this time become almost impenetrable to sound. 

Yet it seemed as though this disability actually quickened 
his mental force. With the arrival of his eightieth year, 
his activity and curiosity of intellect were certainly rather 
increased than abated. He wrote to me from Batsford 
(December 28th, 1915) : — 

" I have been busy for the last two months making a 
close study of Dantq. I have read all the Inferno and half 
of the Purgatorio. It is hard work, but the ' readings ' of 
my old schoolfellow, W. W. Vernon, are an incalculable help, 
and now within the last week or two has appeared Hoare's 
Italian Dictionary, published by the Cambridge University 
Press. A much-needed book, for the previous dictionaries 
were practically useless except for courier's work. How 
splendid Dante is ! But how sickening are the Commen- 
tators, Benvenuto da Imola, Schartazzini and the rest of 
Q 



226 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



them ! They won't let the poet say that the sun shone 
or the night was dark without seeing some hidden and 
mystic meaning in it. They always seem to chercher 
midi a quatorze heures, and irritate me beyond measure. 
There is invention enough in Dante without all their em- 
broidery. But this grubbing and grouting seems to be 
infectious among Dante scholars — they all catch the 
disease." 

He flung himself into these Italian studies with all his 
accustomed ardour. He corresponded with the eminent 
veteran of Dante scholarship, the Honourable W. W. 
Vernon, whom he mentions in the passage just quoted, and 
Mr. Vernon's letters gave him great delight. He wrote 
to me again : — 

" This new object in life gives me huge pleasure. Of 
course, I kne\V the catch quotations in Dante, but I 
never before attempted to read him. The difficulty 

scared me." 

Now, on the contrary, the difficulty was an attraction. 
He worked away for hours at a time, braving the mono- 
tonies of the Purgatorio without flagging, but he broke 
down early in the Paradiso. He had no sympathy whatever 
with what is mystic and spiritual, and he was extremely 
bored by the Beatific Vision and the Rose of the Empyrean. 
I confess I took advantage of this to recall his attention to 
Veluvana, for which it was no longer possible to hope that 
the author would collect any material out of Dante. 

An invitation from Cambridge to lecture there on Russian 
history during the Long Vacation of 1916 was a compliment 
to the value of the Russian chapters of his Memories, but 
it was another distraction. It took his thoughts away 
from Veluvana, although he protested to me that he could 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 227 



prepare his Cambridge address, and yet continue to marshal 
his fancies for the book. Perhaps I doubted it, and dared 
to disapprove, for he wrote (March 17th, 1916) : — 

" You scold me for writing too much. That is the least 
of my troubles ! You must remember that debarred as I 
am from taking part in society, the Three R's alone remain 
to me, and, indeed, of those only two — for owing to my 
having enjoyed an Eton education in days when arith- 
metic was deemed to be no part of the intellectual panoply 
of a gentleman, I can neither add, subtract, nor divide ! I 
am a gluttonous reader, and only write from time to time. ,, 

He was really composing more actively than he himself 
realised. About this time he wrote : — 

" Just now I am busy trying to whitewash Lord Hertford 
— not the Marquess of Steyne, that would be impossible — 
but the unhappy hypochondriac recluse of the Rue Lafitte, 
who I believe has been most malignantly traduced by the 
third-rate English Colony in Paris — all his faults exaggerated, 
none of his good qualities even hinted at. The good 
British public has so long been used to look upon him as 
a minotaur that it will perhaps startle and amuse it to be 
told that he had many admirable points/ ' 

At the beginning of last year the aspect of Lord Redes- 
dale was very remarkable. He had settled down into his 
life at Batsford, diversified by the frequent dashes to Lon- 
don. His years seemed to sit upon him more lightly than 
ever. His azure eyes, his curled white head thrown back, 
the almost jaunty carriage of his well-kept figure, were the 
external symbols of an inner man perpetually fresh, ready 
for adventure and delighted with the pageant of existence. 
He found no fault at all with life, save that it must leave 



228 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



him, and he had squared his shoulders not to give way to 
weakness. Perhaps the only sign of weakness was just 
that visible determination to be strong. But the features 

of his character had none of those mental wrinkles, those 
" rides de r esprit," which Montaigne describes as proper to 
old age. Lord Redesdale was guiltless of the old man's 
self-absorption or exclusive interest in the past. His 
curiosity and sympathy were vividly exhibited to his friends, 
and so, in spite of his amusing violence in denouncing his 
own forgetfulness, was his memory of passing events. In 
the petulance of his optimism he was like a lad. 

There was no change in the early part of last year, 
although it was manifest that the incessant journeying 
between Batsford and London exhausted him. The garden 
occupied him more and more, and he was distracted by the 
great storm of the end of March, which blew down and 
destroyed at the head of the bridge the wonderful group 
of cypresses, which he called " the pride of my old age." 
But, after a gesture of despair, he set himself energetically 
to repair the damage. He was in his usual buoyant health 
when the very hot spell in May tempted him out on 
May 18th, with his agent, Mr. Kennedy, to fish at Swin- 
brook, a beautiful village on his Oxfordshire property, of 
which he was particularly fond. He was not successful, 
and in a splenetic mood he flung himself at full length upon 
a bank of wet grass. He was not allowed to remain there 
long, but the mischief was done, and in a few hours he was 
suffering from a bad cold. Even now, the result might 
not have been serious had it not been that in a few days' 
time he was due to fulfil certain engagements in town. 
Nothing vexed Lord Redesdale more than not to keep a 
pledge. In all such matters he prided himself on being 
punctual and trustworthy, and he refused to change his 
plans by staying at home. 

Accordingly, on May 23rd he came to London to 



Three Experiments in Portraiture 229 



transact some business, and to take the chair next day at 
a meeting of the Royal Society of Literature, of which he 
was a vice-president. This meeting took place in the 
afternoon, and he addressed a crowded assembly, which 
greeted him with great warmth. Those who were present, 
and saw his bright eyes and heard his ringing voice, could 
have no suspicion that they would see him again no more. 
His intimate friends alone perceived that he was making a 
superlative effort. There followed a very bad night, and 
he went down to Batsford next day, going straight to his 
bed, from which he never rose again. His condition, at 
first, gave rise to little alarm. The disease, which proved to 
be catarrhal jaundice, took its course; but for a long time 
his spirit and his unconsciousness of danger sustained him 
and filled those around him with hope. There was no 
disturbance of mind to the very last. In a shaky hand, 
with his stylograph, he continued to correspond with 
certain friends, about politics, and books, and even about 
Veluvana. In the beginning of August there seemed to be 
symptoms of improvement, but these were soon followed by 
a sudden and final relapse. Even after this, Lord Redes- 
dale' s interest and curiosity were sustained. In his very last 
letter to myself, painfully scrawled only one week before 
his death, he wrote : — 

" Have you seen Ernest Daudet's book just published, 
Les auteurs de la guerre de 1914? Bismarck is the subject 
of the first volume; the second will deal with the Kaiser 
and the Emperor Joseph ; and the third with leurs complices. 
I know E. D. ; he is a brother of Alphonse, and is a com- 
petent historian. His book is most illuminating. Of course 
there are exaggerations, but he is always well documente, 
and there is much in his work that is new. I don't admire 
his style. The abuse of the historic present is bad enough, 
but what can be said in favour of the historic future with 



230 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



which we meet at every step? It sets my teeth on 

edge." 

But he grew physically weaker, and seven days later he 
passed into an unconscious state, dying peacefully at noon 
on August 17th, 1916. He was saved, as he had wished 
to be, from all consciousness of decrepitude. 



THOMAS HARDY'S LYRICAL 
POETRY 



THE LYRICAL POETRY OF 



THOMAS HARDY 

When, about Christmas time in 1898, Mr. Hardy's 
admirers, who were expecting from him a new novel, 
received instead a thick volume of verse, there was mingled 
with their sympathy and respect a little disappointment 
and a great failure in apprehension. Those who were 
not rude enough to suggest that a cobbler should stick to 
his last, reminded one another that many novelists had 
sought relaxation by trifling with the Muses. Thackeray 
had published Ballads, and George Eliot had expatiated 
in a Legend of Jubal. No one thought the worse of Con- 
ingsby because its author had produced a Revolutionary 
Epic, It took some time for even intelligent criticism 
to see that the new Wessex Poems did not fall into this 
accidental category, and still, after twenty years, there 
survives a tendency to take the verse of Mr. Hardy, abun- 
dant and solid as it has become, as a mere subsidiary and 
ornamental appendage to his novels. It is still necessary 
to insist on the complete independence of his career as a 
poet, and to point out that if he had never published a 
page of prose he would deserve to rank high among the 
writers of his country on the score of the eight volumes of 
his verse. It is as a lyrical poet, and solely as a lyrical poet, 
that I propose to speak of him to-day. 

It has been thought extraordinary that Cowper was 
over fifty when he published his first secular verses, but 

233 




234 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Mr. Hardy was approaching his sixtieth year when he sent 
Wessex Poems to the press. Such self-restraint — "none 
hath by more studious ways endeavoured, and with more 
unwearied spirit none shall" — has always fascinated the 
genuine artist, but few have practised it with so much 
tenacity. When the work of Mr. Hardy is completed, 
nothing, it is probable, will more strike posterity than its 
unity, its consistency. He has given proof, as scarce any 
other modern writer has done, of tireless constancy of 
resolve. His novels formed an unbroken series from the 
Desperate Remedies of 1871 to The Well-Beloved of 1897. 
In the fulness of his success, and unseduced by all tempta- 
tion, he closed that chapter of his career, and has kept it 
closed. Since 1898 he has been, persistently and periodi- 
cally, a poet and nothing else. That he determined, for 
reasons best left to his own judgment, to defer the 
exhibition of his verse until he had completed his work 
in prose, ought not to prejudice criticism in its analysis 
of the lyrics and the colossal dramatic panorama. Mr. 
Hardy, exclusively as a poet, demands our undivided 
attention. 

It is legitimate to speculate on other probable causes of 
Mr. Hardy's delay. From such information as lies scattered 
before us, we gather that it was from 1865 to 1867 that he 
originally took poetry to be his vocation. The dated 
pieces in the volume of 189S help us to form an idea of the 
original character of his utterance. On the whole it was 
very much what it remains in the pieces composed after a 
lapse of half a century. Already, as a very young man, 
Mr. Hardy possessed his extraordinary insight into the 
movements of human character, and his eloquence in 
translating what he had observed of the tragedy and pain 
of rustic lives. No one, for sixty years, had taken so closely 
to heart the admonitions of Wordsworth in his famous 
Preface to the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads to seek for 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 235 



inspiration in that condition where " the passions of men 
are incorporated with the beautiful forms of nature/ ' 
But it may well be doubted whether Mr. Hardy's poems 
would have* been received in the mid- Victorian age with 
favour, or even have been comprehended. Fifty years ahead 
of his time, he was asking in 1866 for novelty of ideas, 
and he must have been conscious that his questioning would 
seem inopportune. He needed a different atmosphere, 
and he left the task of revolt to another, and, at first sight, 
a very unrelated force, that of the Poems and Ballads of 
the same year. But Swinburne succeeded in his revolution, 
and although he approached the art from an opposite 
direction, he prepared the way for an ultimate appreciation 
of Mr. Hardy. 

We should therefore regard the latter, in spite of his 
silence of forty years, as a poet who laboured, like Swin- 
burne, at a revolution against the optimism and superficial 
sweetness of his age. Swinburne, it is triie, tended to 
accentuate the poetic side of poetry, while Mr. Hardy drew 
verse, in some verbal respects, nearer to prose. This does 
not affect their common attitude, and the sympathy of 
these great artists for one another's work has already been 
revealed, and will be still more clearly exposed. But they 
were unknown to each other in 1866, when to both of them 
the cheap philosophy of the moment, the glittering femi- 
ninity of the " jewelled line," the intense respect for Mrs. 
Grundy in her Sunday satin, appeared trumpery, hateful, 
and to be trampled upon. We find in Mr. Hardy's earliest 
verse no echo of the passionate belief in personal immortality 
which was professed by Ruskin and Browning. He op- 
posed the Victorian theory of human " progress " ; the 
Tennysonian beatific Vision seemed to him ridiculous. 
He rejected the idea of the sympathy and goodness of 
Nature, and was in revolt against the self-centredness of 
the Romantics. We may conjecture that he combined a 



236 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



great reverence for The Book of Job with a considerable 

contempt for In Memoriatn. 

This was not a mere rebellious fancy which passed off; 
it was something inherent that remained, and gives to-day 
their peculiar character to Mr. Hardy's latest lyrics. But 
before we examine the features of this personal mode of 
interpreting poetry to the world, we may collect what 
little light we can on the historic development of it. In the 
pieces dated between 1865 and 1867 we find the germ of 
almost everything which has since characterised the poet. 
In " Amabel " the ruinous passage of years, which has 
continued to be an obsession with Mr. Hardy, is already 
crudely dealt with. The habit of taking poetical negatives 
of small scenes — " your face, and the God-curst sun, and 
a tree, and a pond edged with grayish leaves" (" Neutral 
Times") — which had not existed in English verse since the 
days of Crabbe, reappears. There is marked already a 
sense of terror and resentment against the blind motions of 
chance — In "Hap" the author would positively welcome 
a certainty of divine hatred as a relief from the strain of 
depending upon " crass casualty." Here and there in 
these earliest pieces an extreme difficulty of utterance is 
remarkable in the face of the ease which the poet attained 
afterwards in the expression of his most strange images 
and fantastic revelations. We read in " At a Bridal" : — 

" Should I, too, wed as slave to Mode's decree, 
And each thus found apart, of false desire 
A stolid line, whom no high aims will fire 
As had fired ours could ever have mingled we! " 

This, although perfectly reducible, takes time to think 
out, and at a hasty glance seems muffled up in obscurity 
beyond the darkness of Donne; moreover, it is scarcely 
worthy in form of the virtuoso which Mr. Hardy was 
presently to become. Perhaps of the poems certainly 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 237 



attributable to this earliest period, the little cycle of sonnets 
called " She to Him" gives clearest promise of what was 
coming. The sentiment is that of Ronsard's famous 
" Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, k la chandelle," 
but turned round, as Mr. Hardy loves to do, from the man 
to the woman, and embroidered with ingenuities, such as 
where the latter says that as her temperament dies down the 
habit of loving will remain, and she be 

" Numb as a vane that cankers on its point, 
True to the wind that kissed ere canker came," 

which attest a complexity of mind that Ronsard's society 
knew nothing of. 

On the whole, we may perhaps be safe in conjecturing 
that whatever the cause, the definite dedication to verse 
was now postponed. Meanwhile, the writing of novels had 
become the business of Mr. Hardy's life, and ten years go 
by before we trace a poet in that life again. But it is 
interesting to find that when the great success of Far from 
the Madding Crowd had introduced him to a circle of the 
best readers, there followed an effect which again disturbed 
his ambition for the moment. Mr. Hardy was once more 
tempted to change the form of his work. He wished " to 
get back to verse," but was dissuaded by Leslie Stephen, 
who induced him to start writing The Return of the 
Native instead. On March 29th, 1875, Coventry Patmore, 
then a complete stranger, wrote to express his regret that 
" such almost unequalled beauty and power as appeared 
in the novels should not have assured themselves the 
immortality which would have been conferred upon them 
by the form of verse." This was just at the moment 
when we find Mr. Hardy's conversations with " long Leslie 
Stephen in the velveteen coat'' obstinately turning upon 
" theologies decayed and defunct, the origin of things, 
the constitution of matter, and the unreality of time." 



238 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



To this period belongs also the earliest conception of The 

Dynasts, an old note-book containing, under the date 
June 20th, 1875, the suggestion that the author should 

attempt " An Iliad of Europe from 1789 to 1815." 

To this time also seems to belong the execution of what 
has proved the most attractive section of Mr. Hardy's 
poetry, the narratives, or short Wessex ballads. The 
method in which these came into the world is very curious. 
Many of these stories were jotted down to the extent of a 
stanza or two when the subject first occurred to the author. 
For instance, " The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," first pub- 
lished by Lionel Johnson in 1894, had been begun as 
early as 1867, and was finished ten years later. The long 
ballad of " Leipzig" and the savage " San Sebastian," both 
highly characteristic, were also conceived and a few 
lines of each noted down long before their completion. 
" Valenciennes," however, belongs to 1878, and the " Dance 
at the Phoenix," of which the stanza beginning " 'Twas 
Christmas" alone had been written years before, seems 
to have been finished about the same time. What evidence 
is before us goes to prove that in the 'seventies Mr. Hardy 
became a complete master of the art of verse, and that his 
poetic style was by this time fixed. He still kept poetry 
out of public sight, but he wrote during the next twenty 
years, as though in a backwater off the stream of his novels, 
the poems which form the greater part of the volume of 
1898. If no other collection of his lyrical verse existed, 
we should miss a multitude of fine things, but our general 
conception of his genius would be little modified. 

We should judge carelessly, however, if we treated the 
subsequent volumes as mere repetitions of the original 
Wessex Poems. They present interesting differences, 
which I may rapidly note before I touch on the features 
which characterise the whole body of Mr. Hardy's verse. 
Poems of the Past and Present, which came out in the first 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy '239 



days of 1902, could not but be in a certain measure dis- 
appointing, in so far as it paralleled its three years' product 
with that of the thirty years of Wessex Poems. Old pieces 
were published in it, and it was obvious that in 1898 Mr. 
Hardy might be expected to have chosen from what used 
to be called his " portfolio " those specimens which he 
thought to be most attractive. But on further inspection 
this did not prove to be quite the case. After pondering 
for twelve years on the era of Napoleon, his preoccupation 
began in 1887 to drive him into song 

" Must I pipe a palinody, 

Or be silent thereupon ? ' ' 

He decides that silence has become impossible : — 

" Nay; I'll sing * The Bridge of Lodi ■ — 
That long-loved, romantic thing, 
Though none show by smile or nod, he 
Guesses why and what I sing ! ' ' 

Here is the germ of The Dynasts. But in the meantime 
the crisis of the Boer War had cut across the poet's dream 
of Europe a hundred years ago, and a group of records of 
the Dorsetshire elements of the British army at the close 
of 1899 showed in Mr. Hardy's poetry what had not been 
suspected there — a military talent of a most remarkable 
kind. Another set of pieces composed in Rome were not 
so interesting; Mr. Hardy always seems a little languid 
when he leaves the confines of his native Wessex. Another 
section of Poems of the Past and Present is severely, almost 
didactically, metaphysical, and expands in varied language 
the daring thought, so constantly present in Mr. Hardy's 
reverie, that God Himself has forgotten the existence of 
earth, this " tiny sphere," this " tainted ball," " so poor 
a thing," and has left all human life to be the plaything of 
blind chance. This sad conviction is hardly ruffled by 
" The Darkling Thrush," which goes as far towards 



240 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



optimism as Mr. Hardy can let himself be drawn, or by such 

reflections as those in " On a Fine Morning M : — 

" Whence comes Solace ? Not from seeing 

What is doing, suffering, being; 

Not from noting Life's conditions, 

Not from heeding Time's monitions ; 
But in cleaving to the Dream, 
And in gazing on the gleam 
Whereby gray things golden seem." 

Eight years more passed, years marked by the stupendous 
effort of The Dynasts, before Mr. Hardy put forth another 
collection of lyrical poems. Time's Laughingstocks con- 
firmed, and more than confirmed, the high promise of 
Wessex Poems. The author, in one of his modest prefaces, 
where he seems to whisper while we bend forward in our 
anxiety not to miss one thrifty sentence, expresses the hope 
that Times Laughingstocks will, as a whole, take the 
" reader forward, even if not far, rather than backward/' 

The book, indeed, does not take us " far " forward, simply 
because the writer's style and scope were definitely exposed 
to us already, and yet it does take us " forward/' because 
the hand of the master is conspicuously firmer and his 
touch more daring. The Laughingstocks themselves are 
fifteen in number, tragical stories of division and isolation, 
of failures in passion, of the treason of physical decay. 
No landscape of Mr. Hardy's had been more vivid than 
the night-pictures in " The Revisitation," where the old 
soldier in barracks creeps out on to the gaunt down, and 
meets (by one of Mr. Hardy's coincidences) his ancient 
mistress, and no picture more terrible than the revelation 
of each to the other in a blaze of sunrise. What a document 
for the future is " Reminiscences of a Dancing Man"? 
If only Shakespeare could have left us such a song of the 
London in 1585 ! But the power of the poet culminates 
in the pathos of " The Tramp Woman" — perhaps the 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 241 



greatest of all Mr. Hardy's lyrical poems — and in the horror 
of " A Sunday Morning's Tragedy." 

It is noticeable that Time's Laughingstocks is, in some 
respects, a more daring collection than its predecessors. 
We find the poet here entirely emancipated from con- 
vention, and guided both in religion and morals exclusively 
by the inner light of his reflection. His energy now inter- 
acts on his clairvoyance with a completeness which he had 
never quite displayed before, and it is here that we find 
Mr. Hardy's utterance peculiarly a quintessence of himself. 
Especially in the narrative pieces — which are often Wessex 
novels distilled into a wine-glass, such as " Rose- Ann," 
and " The Vampirine Fair" — he allows no considerations 
of what the reader may think " nice" or " pleasant" to 
shackle his sincerity or his determination ; and it is there- 
fore to Time's Laughingstocks that the reader who wishes 
to become intimately acquainted with Mr. Hardy as a 
moralist most frequently recurs. We notice here more 
than elsewhere in his poems Mr. Hardy's sympathy with 
the local music of Wessex, and especially with its expression 
by the village choir, which he uses as a spiritual symbol. 
Quite a large section of Time's Laughingstocks takes us 
to the old-fashioned gallery of some church, where the 
minstrels are bowing "New Sabbath" or "Mount 
Ephraim," or to a later scene where the ghosts, in whose 
melancholy apparition Mr. Hardy takes such pleasure, 
chant their goblin melodies and strum " the viols of the 
dead" in the moonlit churchyard. The very essence of 
Mr. Hardy's reverie at this moment of his career is to be 
found, for instance, in " The Dead Quire," where the 
ancient phantom-minstrels revenge themselves on their 
gross grandsons outside the alehouse. 

Almost immediately after the outbreak of the present 
war Mr. Hardy presented to a somewhat distraught and 
inattentive public another collection of his poems. It 

R 



242 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



cannot be said that Satires of Circumstance is the most 
satisfactory of those volumes; it is, perhaps, that which 
we could with the least discomposure persuade ourselves 
to overlook. Such a statement refers more to the high 
quality of other pages than to any positive decay of power 
or finish here. There is no less adroitness of touch and 
penetration of view in this book than elsewhere, and the 
poet awakens once more our admiration by his skill in 
giving poetic value to minute conditions of life which 
have escaped less careful observers. But in Satires of 
Circumstance the ugliness of experience is more accentuated 
than it is elsewhere, and is flung in our face with less com- 
punction. The pieces which give name to the volume are 
only fifteen in number, but the spirit which inspires them 
is very frequently repeated in other parts of the collection. 
That spirit is one of mocking sarcasm, and it acts in every 
case by presenting a beautifully draped figure of illusion, 
from which the poet, like a sardonic showman, twitches 
away the robe that he may display a skeleton beneath it. 

We can with little danger assume, as we read the Satires 
of Circumstance, hard and cruel shafts of searchlight as 
they seem, that Mr. Hardy was passing through a mental 
crisis when he wrote them. This seems to be the Troilus 
and Cressida of his life's work, the book in which he is 
revealed most distracted by conjecture and most over- 
whelmed by the miscarriage of everything. The wells of 
human hope have been poisoned for him by some con- 
dition of which we know nothing, and even the picturesque 
features of Dorsetshire landscape, that have always before 
dispersed his melancholy, fail to win his attention : — 

" Bright yellowhammers 

Made mirthful clamours, 
And billed long straws with a bustling air, 

And bearing their load, 

Flew up the road 
That he followed alone, without interest there." 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 243 



The strongest of the poems of disillusion which are the 
outcome of this mood, is " The Newcomer's Wife/' with the 
terrible abruptness of its last stanza. It is not for criticism 
to find fault with the theme of a work of art, but only to 
comment upon its execution. Of the merit of these mono- 
tonously sinister Satires of Circumstance there can be no 
question ; whether the poet's indulgence in the mood which 
gave birth to them does not tend to lower our moral 
temperature and to lessen the rebound of our energy, is 
another matter. At all events, every one must welcome 
a postscript in which a blast on the bugle of war seemed to 
have wakened the poet from his dark brooding to the sense 
of a new chapter in history. 

In the fourth year of the war the veteran poet published 
Moments of Vision. These show a remarkable recovery 
of spirit, and an ingenuity never before excelled. With 
the passage of years Mr. Hardy, observing everything 
in the little world of Wessex, and forgetting nothing, has 
become almost preternaturally wise, and, if it may be said 
so, " knowing," with a sort of magic, like that of a wizard. 
He has learned to track the windings of the human heart 
with the familiarity of a gamekeeper who finds plenty of 
vermin in the woods, and who nails what he finds, be it 
stoat or squirrel, to the barn-door of his poetry. But there 
is also in these last-fruits of Mr. Hardy's mossed tree much 
that is wholly detached from the bitterness of satire, much 
that simply records, with an infinite delicacy of pathos, 
little incidents of the personal life of long ago, bestowing the 
immortality of art on these fugitive fancies in the spirit 
of the Japanese sculptor when he chisels the melting of 
a cloud or the flight of an insect on his sword hilt : — 

' ' I idly cut a parsley stalk 

And blew therein towards the moon ; 
I had not thought what ghosts would walk 
With shivering footsteps to my tune. 



244 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



" I went and knelt, and scooped my hand 
As if to drink, into the brook, 
And a faint figure seemed to stand 
Above me, with the by^-gone look. 

" I lipped rough rhymes of chance not choice, 
I thought not what my words might be ; 
There came into my ear a voice 
That turned a tenderer verse for me." 

We have now in brief historic survey marshalled before 
us the various volumes in which Mr. Hardy's lyrical poetry 
was originally collected. Before we examine its general 
character more closely, it may be well to call attention to 
its technical quality, which was singularly misunderstood 
at first, and which has never, we believe, been boldly faced. 
In 1898, and later, when a melodious falsetto was much in 
fashion amongst us, the reviewers found great fault with 
Mr. Hardy's prosody; they judged him as a versifier to 
be rude and incorrect. As regards the single line, it may 
be confessed that Mr. Hardy, in his anxiety to present his 
thought in an undiluted form, is not infrequently clogged 
and hard. Such a line as 

" Fused from its separateness by ecstasy " 

hisses at us like a snake, and crawls like a wounded one. 
Mr. Hardy is apt to clog his lines with consonants, and he 
seems indifferent to the stiffness which is the consequence 
of this neglect. Ben Jonson said that " Donne, for not 
keeping of accent, deserved hanging " ; perhaps we may go 
so far as to say that Mr. Hardy, for his indifference to a 
mellifluous run lays himself open to a mild rebuke. He is 
negligent of that eternal ornament of English verse, audible 
intricacy, probably because of Swinburne's abuse of it. 
But most of what is called his harshness should rather be 
called bareness, and is the result of a revolt, conscious or 
unconscious, against Keats' prescription of " loading the 
rifts with ore." 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 245 



In saying this, all has been said that an enemy could in 
justice say in blame of his metrical peculiarities. Un- 
questionably he does occasionally, like Robert Browning, 
err in the direction of cacophony. But when we turn to 
the broader part of prosody, we must perceive that Mr. 
Hardy is not only a very ingenious, but a very correct and 
admirable metricist. His stanzaic invention is abundant ; 
no other Victorian poet, not even Swinburne, has employed 
so many forms, mostly of his own invention, and employed 
them so appropriately, that is to say, in so close harmony 
with the subject or story enshrined in them. To take an 
example from his pure lyrics of reflection first, from " The 
Bullfinches" :— 

" Brother Bulleys, let us sing 
From the dawn till evening ! 
For we know not that we go not 
When the day's pale visions fold 
Unto those who sang of old," 

in the exquisite fineness and sadness of the stanza we seem 
to hear the very voices of the birds warbling faintly in the 
sunset. Again, the hurried, timid irresolution of a lover 
always too late is marvellously rendered in the form of 
" Lizbie Browne " : — 

" And Lizbie Browne, 
Who else had hair 
Bay-red as yours, 
Or flesh so fair 
Bred out of doors, 
Sweet Lizbie Browne ? ' ' 

On the other hand, the fierceness of I said to Love " is 
interpreted in a stanza that suits the mood of denunciation, 
while " Tess's Lament " wails in a metre which seems to 
rock like an ageing woman seated alone before the fire, 
with an infinite haunting sadness. 

It is, however, in the narrative pieces, the little Wessex 



246 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Tales, that Mr. Hardy's metrical imagination is most 
triumphant. No two of these are identical in form, and 
for each he selects, or more often invents, a wholly appro- 
priate stanza. He makes many experiments, one of the 
strangest being the introduction of rhymeless lines at regular 
intervals. Of this, " Cicely " is an example which repays 
attention : — 

" And still sadly onward I followed, ^ 
That Highway the Icen 
Which trails its pale riband down Wessex 
O'er lynchet and lea. 

" Along through the Stour-bordered Forum, 
Where legions had wayfared, 
And where the slow river up-glasses 
Its green canopy 

and one still more remarkable is the enchanting " Friends 
Beyond," to which we shall presently recur. The drawling 
voice of a weary old campaigner is wonderfully rendered in 

the stanza of u Valenciennes" : — 

" Well : Heaven wi' its jasper halls 

Is now the on'y town I care to be in . . . 
Good Lord, if Nick should bomb the walls 
As we did Valencieen ! " 

whereas for long Napoleonic stories like "Leipzig" and 
" The Peasant's Confession/' a ballad-measure which con- 
temporaries such as Southey or Campbell might have used 
is artfully chosen. In striking contrast we have the 
elaborate verse-form of " The Souls of the Slain," in which 
the throbbing stanza seems to dilate and withdraw like the 
very cloud of moth-like phantoms which it describes. It 
is difficult to follow out this theme without more frequent 
quotation than I have space for here, but the reader who 
pursues it carefully will not repeat the rumour that Mr. 
Hardy is a careless or 11 incorrect" metricist. He is, on 
the contrary, a metrical artist of great accomplishment. 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 247 



The conception of life revealed in his verses by this careful 
artist is one which displays very exactly the bent of his 
temperament. During the whole of his long career Mr. 
Hardy has not budged an inch from his original line of 
direction. He holds that, abandoned by God, treated with 
scorn by Nature, man lies helpless at the mercy of " those 
purblind Doomsters/' accident, chance, and time, from 
whom he has had to endure injury and insult from the 
cradle to the grave. This is stating the Hardy doctrine in 
its extreme form, but it is not stating it too strongly. This 
has been called his " pessimism/' a phrase to which some 
admirers, unwilling to give things their true name, have 
objected. But, of course, Mr. Hardy is a pessimist, just 
as Browning is an optimist, just as white is not black, and 
day is not night. Our juggling with words in paradox is 
too often apt to disguise a want of decision in thought. 
Let us admit that Mr. Hardy's conception of the fatal 
forces which beleaguer human life is a " pessimistic " one, 
or else words have no meaning. 

Yet it is needful to define in what this pessimism consists. 
It is not the egotism of Byron or the morbid melancholy of 
Chateaubriand. It is directed towards an observation of 
others, not towards an analysis of self, and this gives it 
more philosophical importance, because although romantic 
peevishness is very common among modern poets, and 
although ennui inspires a multitude of sonnets, a deliberate 
and imaginative study of useless suffering in the world 
around us is rare indeed among the poets. It is par- 
ticularly to be noted that Mr. Hardy, although one of the 
most profoundly tragic of all modern writers, is neither 
effeminate nor sickly. His melancholy could never have 
dictated the third stanza of Shelley's " Lines written in 
Dejection in the Bay of Naples." His pessimism is in- 
voluntary, forced from him \>y his experience and his 
constitution, and no analysis could give a better definition 



248 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



of what divides him from the petulant despair of a poet 

like Leopardi than the lines " To Life" : — 

" O life, with the sad scared face, 
I weary of seeing thee, 
And thy draggled cloak, and thy hobbling pace, 
And thy too-forced pleasantry ! 

" I know what thou would 'st tell 
Of Death, Time, Destiny — 
I have known it long, and know, too, well 
What it all means for me. 

" But canst thou not array 
Thyself in rare disguise, 
And feign like truth, for one mad day, 
That Earth is Paradise ? 

" I'll tune me to the mood, 

And mumm with thee till eve, 
And maybe what as interlude 

I feign, I shall believe ! 99 

But the mumming goes no deeper than it does in the 
exquisite poem of " The Darkling Thrush," where the 
carolings of an aged bird, on a frosty evening, are so ecstatic 
that they waken a vague hope in the listener's mind that the 
thrush may possibly know of " some blessed hope " of which 
the poet is " unaware." This is as far as Mr. Hardy ever 
gets on the blest Victorian pathway of satisfaction. 

There are certain aspects in which it is not unnatural to 
see a parallel between Mr. Hardy and George Crabbe. 
Each is the spokesman of a district, each has a passion 
for the study of mankind, each has gained by long years 
of observation a profound knowledge of local human 
character, and each has plucked on the open moor, and wears 
in his coat, the hueless flower of disillusion. But there is 
a great distinction in the aim of the two poets. Crabbe, 
as he describes himself in The Parish Register, was " the 
true physician" who " walks the foulest ward." He was 
utilitarian in his morality ; he exposed the pathos of tragedy 
by dwelling on the faults which led to it, forgetful of the 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 249 



fatality which in more consistent moments he acknow- 
ledged. Crabbe was realistic with a moral design, even 
in the Tales of the Hall, where he made a gallant effort at 
last to arrive at a detachment of spirit. No such effort 
is needed by Mr. Hardy, who has none of the instinct of a 
preacher, and who considers moral improvement outside 
his responsibility. He admits, with his great French 
contemporary, that 

" Tout desir est menteur, toute joie ephemere, 
Toute liqueur au fond de la coupe est amere/' 

but he is bent on discovering the cause of this devastation, 
and not disposed to waste time over its consequences. 
At the end he produces a panacea which neither Crabbe nor 
Byron dreamed of — resignation. 

But the poet has not reached the end of his disillusion. 
He thinks to secure repose on the breast of Nature, the 
alma mater, to whom Goethe and Wordsworth and Browning 
each in his own way turned, and were rewarded by con- 
solation and refreshment. We should be prepared to find 
Mr. Hardy, with his remarkable aptitude for the perception 
of natural forms, easily consoled by the influences of lands- 
scape and the inanimate world. His range of vision is 
wide and extremely exact; he has the gift of reproducing 
before us scenes of various character with a vividness which 
is sometimes startling. But Mr. Hardy's disdain of senti- 
mentality, and his vigorous analysis of the facts of life, 
render him insensible not indeed to the mystery nor to the 
beauty, but to the imagined sympathy, of Nature. He has 
no more confidence in the visible earth than in the invisible 
heavens, and neither here nor there is he able to persuade 
himself to discover a counsellor or a friend. In this con- 
nection, we do well to follow the poet's train of thought in 
the lyric called " In a Wood," where he enters a copse 
dreaming that, in that realm of " sylvan peace/' Nature 



250 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



would offer " a soft release from man's unrest." He 
immediately observes that the pine and the beech are 
struggling for existence, and trying to blight each other 
with dripping poison. He sees the ivy eager to strangle 
the elm, and the hawthorns choking the hollies. Even the 
poplars sulk and turn black under the shadow of a rival. 
In the end, filled with horror at all these crimes of Nature, 
the poet flees from the copse as from an accursed place, and 
he determines that life offers him no consolation except 
the company of those human beings who are as beleaguered 
as himself : — 

" Since, then, no grace I find 

Taught me of trees, 
Turn I back to my kind 

Worthy as these. 
There at least smiles abound, 
There discourse trills around, 
There, now and then, are found, 

Life-loyalties." 

It is absurd, he decides, to love Nature, which has either 
no response to give, or answers in irony. Let us even 
avoid, as much as we can, deep concentration of thought 
upon the mysteries of Nature, lest we become demoralised 
by contemplating her negligence, her blindness, her im- 
placability. We find here a violent reaction against the 
poetry of egotistic optimism which had ruled the romantic 
school in England for more than a hundred years, and we 
recognise a branch of Mr. Hardy's originality. He has 
lifted the veil of Isis, and he finds beneath it, not a bene- 
volent mother of men, but the tomb of an illusion. One 
short lyric, " Yell* ham-Wood's Story," puts this, again 
with a sylvan setting, in its unflinching crudity : — 

" Coomb-Firtrees say that Life is a moan, 
And Clyffe-hill Clump says ' Yea ! ' 
But Yell'ham says a thing of its own : 
It's not, ' Gray, gray, 
Is Life alway ! ' 
That Yell'ham says, 
Nor that Life is for ends unknown. 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 251 



" It says that Life would signify 
A thwarted purposing : 
That we come to live, and are called to die. 
Yes, that's the thing 
In fall, in spring, 
That Yeirham says : — 
■ Life offers — to deny ! ' " 

It is therefore almost exclusively to the obscure history 
of those who suffer and stumble around him, victims of the 
universal disillusion, men and women " come to live but 
called to die," that Mr. Hardy dedicates his poetic function. 
" Lizbie Browne" appeals to us as a typical instance of 
his rustic pathos, his direct and poignant tenderness, and 
if we compare it with such poems of Wordsworth's as 
" Lucy Gray" or " Alice Fell" we see that he starts by 
standing much closer to the level of the subject than his 
great predecessor does. Wordsworth is the benevolent 
philosopher sitting in a post-chaise or crossing the " wide 
moor " in meditation. Mr. Hardy is the familiar neighbour, 
the shy mourner at the grave; his relation is a more 
intimate one : he is patient, humble, un-upbraiding. 
Sometimes, as in the remarkable colloquy called " The 
Ruined Maid," his sympathy is so close as to offer an 
absolute flout in the face to the system of Victorian morality. 
Mr. Hardy, indeed, is not concerned with sentimental 
morals, but with the primitive instincts of the soul, applaud- 
ing them, or at least recording them with complacency, 
even when they outrage ethical tradition, as they do in the 
lyric narrative called " A Wife and Another." The stanzas 
"To an Unborn Pauper Child" sum up what is sinister 
and what is genial in Mr. Hardy's attitude to the unam- 
bitious forms of life which he loves to contemplate. 

His temperature is not always so low as it is in the class 
of poems to which we have just referred, but his ultimate 
view is never more sanguine. He is pleased sometimes to 
act as the fiddler at a dance, surveying the hot-blooded 



252 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



couples, and urging them on by the lilt of his instrument, 
but he is always perfectly aware that they will have " to 
pay high for their prancing n at the end of all. No instance 
of this is more remarkable than the poem called " Julie- 
Jane/' a perfect example of Mr. Hardy's metrical ingenuity 
and skill, which begins thus : — 

" Sing; how 'a would sing ! 
How 'a would raise the tune 
When we rode in the waggon from harvesting 
By the light o' the moon ! 

" Dance; how 'a would dance ! 
If a fiddlestring did but sound 
She would hold out her coats, give a slanting glance. 
And go round and round. 

" Laugh; how 'a would laugh ! 
Her peony lips would part 
As if none such a place for a lover to quaff 
At the deeps of a heart," 

and which then turns to the most plaintive and the most 
irreparable tragedy, woven, as a black design on to a 
background of gold, upon this basis of temperamental 

joyousness. 

Alphonse Daudet once said that the great gift of Edmond 
de Goncourt was to " rendre V irrendable" This is much 
more true of Mr. Hardy than it was of Goncourt, and more 
true than it is of any other English poet except Donne. 
There is absolutely no observation too minute, no flutter 
of reminiscence too faint, for Mr. Hardy to adopt as the 
subject of a metaphysical lyric, and his skill in this direction 
has grown upon him ; it is nowhere so remarkable as in his 
latest volume, aptly termed Moments of Vision. Every- 
thing in village life is grist to his mill ; he seems to make no 
selection, and his field is modest to humility and yet 
practically boundless. We have a poem on the attitude 
of two people with nothing to do and no book to read, 
waiting in the parlour of an hotel for the rain to stop, a 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 253 



recollection after more than forty years. That the poet 
once dropped a pencil into the cranny of an old church 
where he was sketching inspires an elaborate lyric. The 
disappearance of a rotted summer-house, the look of a 
row of silver drops of fog condensed on the bar of a gate, 
the effect of candlelight years and years ago on a woman's 
neck and hair, the vision of a giant at a fair, led by a dwarf 
with a red string — such are amongst the subjects which 
awaken in Mr. Hardy thoughts which do often lie too deep 
for tears, and call for interpretation in verse. The skeleton 
of a lady's sunshade, picked up on Swanage Cliffs, the 
pages of a fly-blown Testament lying in a railway waiting- 
room, a journeying boy in a third-class carriage, with his 
ticket stuck in the band of his hat — such are among the 
themes which awake in Mr. Hardy's imagination reveries 
which are always wholly serious and usually deeply tragic. 

Mr. Hardy's notation of human touches hithertp excluded 
from the realm of poetry is one of the most notable features 
of his originality. It marked his work from the beginning, 
as in the early ballad of " The Widow," where the sudden 
damping of the wooer's amatory ardour in consequence of 
his jealousy of the child is rendered with extraordinary 
refinement. The difficulty of course is to know when to 
stop. There is always a danger that a poet, in his search 
after the infinitely ingenious, may lapse into amphigory, 
into sheer absurdity and triviality, which Cowper, in spite 
of his elegant lightness, does not always escape. Words- 
worth, more serious in his intent, fell headlong in parts of 
Peter Bell, and in such ballads as "Betty Foy." Mr. 
Hardy, whatever the poverty of his incident, commonly 
redeems it by the oddity of his observation; as in " The 
Pedigree " : — 

" I bent in the deep of night 
Over a pedigree the chronicler gave 
As mine ; and as I bent there, half -unrobed, 



254 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



The uncurtained panes of my window-square 

Let in the watery light 

Of the moon in its old age : 
And green-rheumed clouds were hurrying past 

Where mute and cold it globed 
Like a dying dolphin's eye seen through a lapping wave." 

Mr. Hardy's love of strange experiences, and of adven- 
tures founded on a balance of conscience and instinct, is 
constantly exemplified in those ballads and verse-anecdotes 
which form the section of his poetry most appreciated by 
the general public. Among these, extraordinarily represen- 
tative of the poet's habit of mind, is " My Cicely/' a tale 
of the eighteenth century, where a man impetuously 
rides from London through Wessex to be present at the 
funeral of the wrong woman ; as he returns, by a coincidence, 
he meets the right woman, whom he used to love, and is 
horrified at " her liquor-fired face, her thick accents." 
He determines that by an effort of will the dead woman 
(whom he never saw) shall remain, what she seemed during 
his wild ride, " my Cicely," and the living woman be 
expunged from memory. A similar deliberate electing 
that the dream shall hold the place of the fact is the motive 
of " The Well-Beloved." The ghastly humour of " The 
Curate's Kindness" is a sort of reverse action of the same 
mental subtlety. Misunderstanding takes a very prominent 
place in Mr. Hardy's irony of circumstance; as, almost too 
painfully, in " The Rash Bride," a hideous tale of suicide 
following on the duplicity of a tender and innocent widow. 

The grandmother of Mr. Hardy was born in 1772, and 
survived until 1857. From her lips he heard many an 
obscure old legend of the life of Wessex in the eighteenth 
century. Was it she who told him the terrible Exmoor 
story of " The Sacrilege; " the early tale of " The Two 
Men," which might be the skeleton-scenario for a whole 
elaborate novel; or that incomparable comedy in verse, 
" The Fire at Tranter Sweatley's," with its splendid human 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 255 



touch at the very end? We suspect that it was; and 
perhaps at the same source he acquired his dangerous 
insight into the female heart, whether exquisitely feeble 
as in " The Home-coming " with its delicate and ironic sur- 
prise, or treacherous, as in the desolating ballad of " Rose- 
Ann." No one, in prose or verse, has expatiated more 
poignantly than Mr. Hardy on what our forefathers used 
to call " cases of conscience." He seems to have shared 
the experiences of souls to whom life was " a wood before 
your doors, and a labyrinth within the wood, and locks 
and bars to every door within that labyrinth/ ' as Jeremy 
Taylor describes that of the anxious penitents who came 
to him to confession. The probably very early story of 
"The Casterbridge Captains" is a delicate study in com- 
punction, and a still more important example is " The 
Alarm," where the balance of conscience and instinct gives 
to what in coarser hands might seem the most trivial of 
actions a momentous character of tragedy. 

This is one of Mr. Hardy's studies in military history, 
where he is almost always singularly happy. His portraits 
of the non-commissioned officer of the old service are as 
excellent in verse as they are in the prose of The Trumpet- 
Major or The Melancholy Hussar. The reader of the 
novels will not have to be reminded that " Valenciennes" 
and the other ballads have their prose-parallel in Simon 
Burden' s reminiscences of Minden. Mr. Hardy, with a great 
curiosity about the science of war and a, close acquaint- 
ance with thefmind of the common soldier, has pondered 
on the philosophy of fighting. " The Man he Killed," 
written in 1902, expresses the wonder of the rifleman who 
is called upon to shoot his brother-in-arms, although 

" Had lie and I but met, 
By some old ancient inn, 
We should have set us down to wet 
Right many a nipperkin ' 



256 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



In this connection the Poems of War and Patriotism, 

which form an important part of the volume of 1918, 

should be carefully examined by those who meditate on 

the tremendous problems of the moment. 

A poet so profoundly absorbed in the study of life could 
not fail to speculate on the probabilities of immortality 
Here Mr. Hardy presents to us his habitual serenity in 
negation. He sees the beautiful human body " lined by 
tool of time," and he asks what becomes of it when its 
dissolution is complete. He sees no evidence of a conscious 
state after death, of what would have to be, in the case of 
aged or exhausted persons, a revival of spiritual force, 
and on the whole he is disinclined to cling to the faith in 
a future life. He holds that the immortality of a dead man 
resides in the memory of the living, his " finer part shining 
within ever-faithful hearts of those bereft." He pursues 
this theme in a large number of his most serious and 
affecting lyrics, most gravely perhaps in " The To-be- 
Forgotten" and in " The Superseded." This sense of the 
forlorn condition of the dead, surviving only in the dwindling 
memory of the living, inspires what has some claims to be 
considered the loveliest of all Mr. Hardy's poems, " Friends 
Beyond," which in its tenderness, its humour, and its 
pathos contains in a few pages every characteristic of his 
genius. 

His speculation perceives the dead as a crowd of slowly 
vanishing phantoms, clustering in their ineffectual longing 
round the footsteps of those through whom alone they 
continue to exist. This conception has inspired Mr. Hardy 
with several wonderful visions, among which the spectacle 
of " The Souls of the Slain" in the Boer War, alighting, 
like vast flights of moths, over Portland Bill at night, is 
the most remarkable. It has the sublimity and much of 
the character of some apocalyptic design by Blake. The 
volume of 1902 contains a whole group of phantasmal 



The Lyrical Poetry of Thomas Hardy 257 

pieces of this kind, where there is frequent mention of 
spectres, who address the poet in the accents of nature, 
as in the unrhymed ode called " The Mother Mourns.' ' 
The obsession of old age, with its physical decay (" I look 
into my glass "), the inevitable division which leads to 
that isolation which the poet regards as the greatest of 
adversities ("The Impercipient "), the tragedies of moral 
indecision, the contrast between the tangible earth and the 
bodyless ghosts, and endless repetition of the cry, " Why 
find we us here? " and of the question " Has some Vast 
Imbecility framed us in jest, and left us now to hazardry ? " — 
all start from the overwhelming love of physical life and 
acquaintance with its possibilities, which Mr. Hardy pos- 
sesses to an inordinate degree. 

It would be ridiculous at the close of an essay to attempt 
any discussion of the huge dramatic panorama which 
many believe to be Mr. Hardy's most weighty contribution 
to English literature. The spacious theatre of The Dynasts 
with its comprehensive and yet concise realisations of vast 
passages of human history, is a work which calls for a 
commentary as lengthy as itself, and yet needs no com- 
mentary at all. No work of the imagination is more its 
own interpreter than this sublime historic peep-show, this 
rolling vision of the Napoleonic chronicle drawn on the 
broadest lines, and yet in detail made up of intensely 
concentrated and vivid glimpses of reality. But the 
subject of my present study, the lyrical poetry of Mr. 
Hardy, is not largely illustrated in The Dynasts, except 
by the choral interludes of the phantom intelligences, 
which have great lyrical value, and by three or four 
admirable songs. 

When we resume the effect which the poetry of Mr. 
Hardy makes upon the careful reader, we note, as I have 
indicated already, a sense of unity of direction throughout. 
Mr. Hardy has expressed himself in a thousand ways, but 
s 



258 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



has never altered his vision. From 1867 to 1917, through 
half a century of imaginative creation, he has not modified 
the large outlines of his art in the smallest degree. To 
early readers of his poems, before the full meaning of them 
became evident, his voice sounded inharmonious, because 
it did not fit in with the exquisite melodies of the later 
Victorian age. But Mr. Hardy, with characteristic 
pertinacity, did not attempt to alter his utterance in the 
least, and now we can all perceive, if we take the trouble 
to do so, that what seemed harsh in his poetry was his 
peculiar and personal mode of interpreting his thoughts 
to the world. 

As in his novels so in his poems, Mr. Hardy has 
chosen to remain local, to be the interpreter for present 
and future times of one rich and neglected province of the 
British realm. From his standpoint there he contemplates 
the wide aspect of life, but it seems huge and misty to him, 
and he broods over the tiny incidents of Wessex idiosyn- 
cracy. His irony is audacious and even sardonic, and few 
poets have been less solicitous to please their weaker 
brethren. But no poet of modern times has been more 
careful to avoid the abstract and to touch upon the real. 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 



SOME SOLDIER POETS 



The two years which preceded the outbreak of the war 
were marked in this country by a revival of public interest 
in the art of poetry. To this movement coherence was 
given and organisation introduced by Mr. Edward Marsh's 
now-famous volume entitled Georgian Poetry. The effect 
of this collection — for it is hardly correct to call it an antho- 
logy — of the best poems written by the youngest poets 
since 191 1 was two-fold; it acquainted readers with work 
few had " the leisure or the zeal to investigate/' and it 
brought the writers themselves together in a corporate 
and selected relation. I do not recollect that this had 
been done — except prematurely and partially by The Germ 
of 1850 — since the England's Parnassus and England's 
Helicon of 1600. In point of fact the only real precursor 
of Mr. Marsh's venture in our whole literature is the 
Songs and Sonnettes of 1557, commonly known as TotteVs 
Miscellany. Tottel brought together, for the first time, 
the lyrics of Wyatt, Surrey, Churchyard, Vaux, and Bryan, 
exactly as Mr. Marsh called public attention to Rupert 
Brooke, James Elroy Flecker and the rest of the Georgians, 
and he thereby fixed the names of those poets, as Mr. 
Marsh has fixed those of our youngest fledglings, on the 
roll of English literature. 

The general tone of the latest poetry, up to the moment 
of the outbreak of hostilities, was pensive, instinct with 
natural piety, given somewhat in excess to description of 
landscape, tender in feeling, essentially unaggressive except 
towards the clergy and towards other versifiers of an 

261 



262 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



earlier generation. There was absolutely not a trace in 

any one of the young poets of that arrogance and vociferous 

defiance which marked German verse during the same years. 
These English shepherds might hit at their elders with 
their staves, but they had turned their swords into pruning- 
hooks and had no scabbards to rattle. This is a point 
which might have attracted notice, if we had not all been 
too drowsy in the lap of our imperial prosperity to observe 
the signs of the times in Berlin. Why did no one call 
our attention to the beating of the big drum which was 
going on so briskly on the Teutonic Parnassus? At all 
events, there was no echo of such a noise in the " chambers 
of imagery n which contained Mr. Gordon Bottomley, or 
in Mr. W. H. Davies' wandering " songs of joy," or on 
" the great hills and solemn chanting seas' ' where Mr. 
John Drinkwater waited for the advent of beauty. And 
the guns of August 1914 found Mr. W. W. Gibson encom- 
passed by " one dim, blue infinity of starry peace." There 
is a sort of German Georgian Poetry in existence ; in time 
to come a comparison of its pages with those of Mr. 
Marsh may throw a side-light on the question, Who 
prepared the War? 

The youngest poets were more completely taken by 
surprise in August 1914 than their elders. The earliest 
expressions of lyric military feeling came from veteran 
voices. It was only proper that the earliest of all should 
be the Poet Laureate's address to England, ending with 
the prophecy : — 

" Much suffering shall cleanse thee ! 
But thou through the flood 
Shalt win to Salvation, 

To Beauty through blood." 

As sensation, however, followed sensation in those first 
terrific and bewildering weeks, much was happening that 



Some Soldier Poets 



263 



called forth with the utmost exuberance the primal emotions 
of mankind ; there was full occasion for 

" exultations, agonies, 
And love, and man's unconquerable mind." 

By September a full chorus was vocal, led by our 
national veteran, Mr. Thomas Hardy, with his Song of the 
Soldiers : — 

" What of the faith and fire within us, 

Men who march away 

Ere the barn-cocks say 

Night is growing gray, 
To hazards whence no tears can win us ; 
What of the faith and fire within us, 

Men who march away ? ' ' 

Already, before the close of the autumn of 1914, four or 
five anthologies of war-poems were in the press, and the 
desire of the general public to be fed with patriotic and 
emotional verse was manifested in unmistakable ways. We 
had been accustomed for some time past to the issue of a 
multitude of little pamphlets of verse, often very carefully 
written, and these the critics had treated with an indul- 
gence which would have whitened the hair of the stern 
reviewers of forty years ago. The youthful poets, almost 
a trade-union in themselves, protected one another by their 
sedulous generosity. It was very unusual to see anything 
criticised, much less " slated' ' ; the balms of praise were 
poured over every rising head, and immortalities were 
predicted by the dozen. Yet, as a rule, the sale of these 
little poetic pamphlets had been small, and they had been 
read only by those who had a definite object in doing so. 

The immediate success of the anthologies, however, 
proved that the war had aroused in a new public an ear 
for contemporary verse, an attention anxious to be stirred 
or soothed by the assiduous company of poets who had 



264 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



been ripening their talents in a little clan. These had now 
an eager world ready to listen to them. The result 
was surprising; we may even, without exaggeration, call 
it unparalleled. There had never before, in the world's 
history, been an epoch which had tolerated and even 
welcomed such a flood of verse as was poured forth over 
Great Britain during the first three years of the war. 
Those years saw the publication, as I am credibly informed, 
of more than five hundred volumes of new and original 
poetry. It would be the silliest complaisance to pretend 
that all of this, or much of it, or any but a very little of 
it, has been of permanent value. Much of it was windy and 
superficial, striving in wild vague terms to express great 
agitations which were obscurely felt by the poet. There 
was too much of the bathos of rhetoric, especially at first ; 
too much addressing the German as " thou fell, bloody 
brute," and the like, which broke no bones and took no 
trenches. 

When once it was understood that, as a cancelled line 
in Tennyson's Maud has it, 

" The long, long canker of peace was over and done," 

the sentiments of indignation and horror made themselves 
felt with considerable vivacity. In this direction, how- 
ever, none of the youngest poets approached Sir Owen 
Seaman in the vigour of their invective. Most of them 
seemed to be overpowered by the political situation, and 
few could free themselves from their inured pacific habit 
of speech. Even when they wrote of Belgium, the Muse 
seemed rather to weep than to curse. Looking back to 
the winter of 1914, it is almost pathetic to observe how 
difficult it was for our easy-going British bards to hate the 
Germans. There was a good deal of ineffective violence, 
and considerable misuse of technical terms, caused, in 
many cases, by a too hasty reference to newspaper reports 



Some Soldier Poets 



265 



of gallantry under danger, in the course of which the more 
or less obscure verbiage of military science was picturesquely 
and inaccurately employed. As the slightly censorious 
reader looks back upon these poems of the beginning of 
the War, he cannot resist a certain impatience. In the first 
place, there is a family likeness which makes it impossible 
to distinguish one writer from another, and there is a 
tendency to a smug approval of British prejudice, and to 
a horrible confidence in England's power of " muddling 
through/' which look rather ghastly in the light of 
subsequent struggles. 

There was, however, a new spirit presently apparent, 
and a much healthier one. The bards became soldiers, 
and in crossing over to France and Flanders, each had 
packed his flute in his kit. They began to send home 
verses in which they translated into music their actual 
experiences and their authentic emotions. We found 
ourselves listening to young men who had something new, 
and what was better, something noble to say to us, and 
we returned to the national spirit which inspired the 
Chansons de Geste in the eleventh century. To the spirit — 
but not in the least to the form, since it is curious that 
the war-poetry of 1914-17 was, even in the most skilful 
hands, poetry on a small scale. The two greatest of the 
primal species of verse, the Epic and the Ode, were 
entirely neglected, except, as will later be observed, in one 
notable instance by Major Maurice Baring. As a rule, the 
poets constrained themselves to observe the discipline of 
a rather confined lyrical analysis in forms of the simplest 
character. Although particular examples showed a rare 
felicity of touch, and although the sincerity of the 
reflection in many cases hit upon very happy forms of 
expression, it is impossible to overlook the general mono- 
tony. There used to be a story that the Japanese Govern- 
ment sent a committee of its best art-critics to study the 



266 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



relative merits of the modern European painters, and 

that they returned with the bewildered statement that 
they could make no report, because all European pictures 
were exactly alike. A student from Patagonia might 
conceivably argue that he could discover no difference 

whatever between our various poets of the war. 

This would be unjust, but it is perhaps not unfair to 
suggest that the determined resistance to all restraint, 
which has marked the latest school, is not really favourable 
to individuality. There has been a very general, almost a 
universal tendency to throw off the shackles of poetic form. 
It has been supposed that by abandoning the normal re- 
straints, or artificialities, of metre and rhyme, a greater 
directness and fidelity would be secured. Of course, if an 
intensified journalistic impression is all that is desired, 
" prose cut up into lengths " is the readiest by-way to effect. 
But if the poets desire — and they all do desire — to speak 
to ages yet unborn, they should not forget that all the 
experience of history goes to prove discipline not unfavour- 
able to poetic sincerity, while, on the other hand, the 
absence of all restraint is fatal to it. Inspiration does 
not willingly attend upon flagging metre and discordant 
rhyme, and never in the whole choral progress from Pindar 
down to Swinburne has a great master been found who 
did not exult in the stubbornness of " dancing words and 
speaking strings,' ' or who did not find his joy in reducing 
them to harmony. The artist who avoids all difficulties 
may be pleased with the rapidity of his effect, but he will 
have the vexation of finding his success an ephemeral 
one. The old advice to the poet, in preparing the rich 
chariot of the Muse, still holds good : — 

" Let the postillion, Nature, mount, but let 
The coachman, Art, be set." 

Too many of our recent rebellious bards fancy that the 



Some Soldier Poets 



267 



coach will drive itself, if only the post-boy sticks his heels 
hard into Pegasus. 

It is not, however, the object of this essay to review all 
the poetry which was written about the war, nor even 
that part of it which owed its existence to the strong 
feeling of non-combatants at home. I propose to fix our 
attention on what was written by the young soldiers 
themselves in their beautiful gallantry, verse which comes 
to us hallowed by the glorious effort of battle, and in too 
many poignant cases by the ultimate sacrifice of life itself. 
The poet achieves his highest meed of contemporary 
glory, if 

" some brave young man's untimely fate 
In words worth dying for he celebrate," 

and when he is himself a young man striving for the same 
deathless honour on the same field of blood it is difficult 
to conceive of circumstances more poignant than those 
which surround his effort. On many of these poets a 
death of the highest nobility set the seal of eternal life. 
They were simple and passionate, radiant and calm, they 
fought for their country, and they have entered into glory. 
This alone might be enough to say in their praise, but 
star differeth from star in brightness, and from the con- 
stellation I propose to select half a dozen of- the clearest 
luminaries. What is said in honest praise of these may 
be said, with due modification, of many others who miss 
merely the polish of their accomplishment. It is perhaps 
worth noticing, in passing, that most of the poets are men 
of university training, and that certain literary strains 
are common to the rank and file of them. The influence 
of Tennyson, Browning, Swinburne, and Rossetti is almost 
entirely absent. The only one of the great Victorians 
whom they seem to have read is Matthew Arnold, but it 
is impossible to help observing that the Shropshire Lad 



268 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



of Mr. A. E. Housman was in the tunic-pocket of every 
one of them. Among the English poets of the past, it is 

mainly the so-called " metaphysical " writers in the seven- 
teenth century whom they studied ; Donne seems to have 
been a favourite with them all, and Vaughan and Treherne 

were not far behind. 

The spontaneous instinct of readers has taken the name 
of Rupert Brooke to illustrate the poetic spirit of the great 
war in a superlative degree. His posthumous volume, 
brought out' in May 1915, a few weeks after his death, 
has enjoyed a success which is greater, perhaps, than that 
of all the other poems of the war put together. He has 
become a sort of symbol, even a sort of fetish, and he is 
to English sentiment what Charles Peguy is to France, 
an oriflamme of the chivalry of his country. It is curious, 
in this connection, that neither Peguy nor Brooke had the 
opportunity of fighting much in the cause; they fell, as 
it seemed for the moment, obscurely. Rupert Brooke was 
a pawn in the dark and dolorous flight from Antwerp. 
He died in the /Egean, between Egypt and Gallipoli, having 
never seen a Turkish enemy. So Peguy faded out of sight 
on the very opening day of the battle of the Marne, yet 
each of these young men was immediately perceived to 
have embodied the gallantry of his country. The extra- 
ordinary popularity of Rupert Brooke is due to the excellence 
of his verse, to the tact with which it was presented to the 
public, but also to a vague perception of his representative 
nature. He was the finest specimen of a certain type 
produced at the universities, and then sacrificed to our 
national necessity. 

It is needless to describe the verses of Rupert Brooke, 
which have attained a circulation which any poet might 
envy. They are comprised in two slender volumes, that 
above mentioned, and one of 191 1, published while he 
was still at Cambridge. He was born in 1887, anc * when 



Some Soldier Poets 



269 



he died off Skyros, in circumstances of the most romantic 
pathos, he had not completed his twenty-eighth year. He 
was, unlike the majority of his contemporaries, a meticulous 
and reserved writer, little inclined to be pleased with his 
work, and cautious to avoid the snare of improvisation. 
Hence, though he lived to be older than did Keats or 
Fergusson, he left a very slender garland of verse behind 
him, in which there is scarcely a petal which is not of 
some permanent value. For instance, in the volume of 
191 1 we found not a few pieces which then seemed crude 
in taste and petulant in temper; but even these now 
illustrate a most interesting character of which time has 
rounded the angles, and we would not have otherwise 
what illustrates so luminously — and so divertingly — that 
precious object, the mind of Rupert Brooke. 

Yet there is a danger that this mind and character may 
be misinterpreted, even by those who contemplate the 
poet's memory with idolatry. There is some evidence of 
a Rupert Brooke legend in the process of formation, which 
deserves to be guarded against not less jealously than the 
R. L. Stevenson legend of a few years ago. We know that 
for some people gold and lilies are not properly honoured 
until they are gilded and painted. Rupert Brooke was 
far from being either a plaster saint or a vivid public 
witness. He was neither a trumpet nor a torch. He 
lives in the memory of those who knew him as a smiling 
and attentive spectator, eager to watch every flourish of 
the pageantry of life. Existence was a wonderful harmony 
to Rupert Brooke, who was determined to lose no tone of 
it by making too much noise himself. In company he 
was not a great talker, but loved to listen, with sparkling 
deference, to people less gifted than himself if only they 
hid experience to impart. He lived in a fascinated state, 
bewitched with wonder and appreciation. His very fine 
appearance, which seemed to glow with dormant vitality, 



270 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



his beautiful manners, the quickness of his intelligence, 
his humour, were combined under the spell of a curious 
magnetism, difficult to analyse. When he entered a room, 
he seemed to bring sunshine with him, although he was 
usually rather silent, and pointedly immobile. I do not 
think it would be easy to recollect any utterance of his 
which was very remarkable, but all he said and did added 
to the harmonious, ardent, and simple effect. 

There is very little of the poetry of Rupert Brooke 
which can be definitely identified with the war. The last 
six months of his life, spent in conditions for which nothing 
in his previous existence in Cambridge or Berlin, in Grant- 
chester or Tahiti, had in the least prepared him, were 
devoted — for we must not say wasted — to breaking up the 
cliche of civilised habits. But of this harassed time there 
remain to us the five immortal Sonnets, which form the 
crown of Rupert Brooke's verse, and his principal legacy 
to English literature. Our record would be imperfect 
without the citation of one, perhaps the least hackneyed 
of these : — 

" Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead I 

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, 
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. 
These laid the world away ; poured out the red 
Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
That men call age ; and those who would have been, 
Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 

" Blow, bugles, blow 1 They brought us, for our dearth, 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love and Pain. 

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage ; 

And Nobleness walks in our ways again ; 
And we have come into our heritage." 

If the fortune of his country had not disturbed his plans, 
it is more than probable that Rupert Brooke would have 
become an enlightened and enthusiastic professor. Of the 



Some Soldier Poets 



271 



poet who detains us next it may be said that there was 
hardly any walk of life, except precisely this, which he 
could* not have adorned. Julian Grenfell, who was a poet 
almost by accident, resembled the most enlightened of 
the young Italian noblemen of the Renaissance, who gave 
themselves with violence to a surfeit of knowledge and a 
riot of action. He was a humanist of the type of the 
fifteenth century, soldier, scholar, and man of pleasure, 
such as we read of in Vespasiano's famous book. Every- 
thing he did was done in the service of St. Epicurus, it was 
done to darsi buon tempo, as the Tuscans used to say. But 
this was only the superficial direction taken by his energy ; 
if he was imperious in his pleasures, he was earnest in his 
pursuit of learning ; there was a singular harmony in the 
exercise of the physical, intellectual, and emotional faculties 
at his disposal. Julian Grenfell was a master of the body 
and of the mind, an unrivalled boxer, a pertinacious hunter, 
skilled in swimming and polo, a splendid shot, a swift 
runner, and an unwearying student. That an athlete so 
accomplished should have had time left for intellectual 
endowments is amazing, but his natural pugnacity led him 
to fight lexicons as he fought the wild boar, and with as 
complete success. 

The record of the brief and shining life of Julian Grenfell 
has been told in an anonymous record of family life which 
is destined to reverberate far beyond the discreet circle of 
friends to which it is provisionally addressed. It is a docu- 
ment of extraordinary candour, tact, and fidelity, and it is 
difficult to say whether humour or courage is the quality 
which illuminates it most. It will be referred to by future 
historians of our race as the most vivid record which has 
been preserved of the red-blooded activity of a spirited 
patrician family at the opening of the twentieth century. 
It is partly through his place at the centre of this record 
that, as one of the most gifted of his elder friends has said, 



272 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



the name of Julian Grenfell will be linked tl with all that 

is swift and chivalrous, lovely and courageous/ ' but it is 

also through his rare and careless verses. 

Julian Grenfell, who was born to excel with an enviable 
ease, was not a poet by determination. In a family where 
everything has been preserved, no verses of his that are 
not the merest boyish exercises are known to exist previous 
to the war. He was born in 1888, and he became a pro- 
fessional soldier in India in 191 1. He was on his way 
home from South Africa when hostilities broke out, and 
he was already fighting in Flanders in October 1914. After 
a very brilliant campaign, in the course of which he 
won the D.S.O. and was twice mentioned in despatches, 
he was shot in the head near Ypres and died of his 
wounds at Boulogne on May 26th, 1915. During these 
months in France, by the testimony of all who saw 
him and of all to whom he wrote, his character 
received its final touch of ripeness. Among his other 
attainments he abruptly discovered the gift of noble gnomic 
verse. On receiving news of the death of Rupert Brooke, 
and a month before his own death, Julian Grenfell wrote 
the verses called " Into Battle," which contain the un- 
forgettable stanzas : — 

" The lighting man shall from the sun 

Take warmth, and life from the glowing earth; 
Speed with the light-foot winds to run, 
And with the trees to newer birth. . . . 

" The woodland trees that stand together, 
They stand to him each one a friend ; 
They gently speak in the windy weather ; 
They guide to valley and ridge's end. 

" The kestrel hovering by day, 

And the little owls that call by night, 
Bid him be swift and keen as they, 
As keen of ear, as swift of sight. 

" The blackbird sings to him ' Brother, brother, 
If this be the last song you shall sing. 
Sing well, for you may not sing another, 
Brother, sing.' " 



Some Soldier Poets 273 

The whole of this poem is memorable, down to its final 
prophetic quatrain : — 

" The thundering line of battle stands, 

And in the air Death moans and sings ; 
But Day shall clasp him with strong hands, 
And Night shall fold him in soft wings." 

" Could any other man in the British Army have knocked 
out a heavy-weight champion one week and written that 
poem the next ? " a brother officer asked. " Into Battle " 
remains, and will probably continue to remain, the clearest 
lyrical expression of the fighting spirit of England in which 
the war has found words. It is a poem for soldiers, and it 
gives noble form to their most splendid aspirations. Julian 
Grenfell wrote, as he boxed and rode, as he fought in the 
mud of Flanders, as the ideal sporting Englishman of our 
old, heroic type. 

The ancient mystery of verse is so deeply based on 
tradition that it is not surprising that all the strange con- 
trivances of twentieth-century warfare have been found 
too crabbed for our poets to use. When great Marlborough, 
as Addison puts it, " examin'd all the dreadful scenes of 
war" at Blenheim, he was really in closer touch with 
Marathon than with the tanks and gas of Ypres. But 
there is one military implement so beautiful in itself, and 
so magical in the nature of its service, that it is bound to 
conquer a place in poetry. The air-machine, to quote 
The Campaign once more, "rides in the whirlwind and 
directs the storm." But the poets are still shy of it r In 
French it has, as yet, inspired but one good poem, the 
" Plus haut toujours ! " of Jean Allard-Meeus, a hymn of 
real aerial majesty. In English Major Maurice Baring's 
ode " In Memoriam : A.H." is equally unique, and, in its 
complete diversity from Allard-Meeus' rhapsody, sug- 
gests that the aeroplane has a wide field before it in the 

T 



274 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



realms of imaginative writing. Major Baring's subject is 
the death of Auberon Herbert, Lord Lucas, who was killed 
on November 3rd, 1916. This distinguished young states- 
man and soldier had just been promoted, after a career 
of prolonged gallantry in the air, and would have flown no 
more, if he had returned in safety to our front on that 
fatal day. 

Major Baring has long been known as an excellent 
composer of sonnets and other short pieces. But " In 
Memoriam : A.H." lifts him to a position among our living 
poets to which he had hardly a pretension. In a long 
irregular threnody or funeral ode, the great technical 
difficulty is to support lyrical emotion throughout. No 
form of verse is more liable to lapses of dignity, to dull 
and flagging passages. Even Dry den in Anne Killigrew, 
even Coleridge in the Departing Year, have not been 
able to avoid those languors. Many poets attempt to 
escape them by a use of swollen and pompous language. 
I will not say that Major Baring has been universally 
successful, where the success of the great masters is only 
relative, but he has produced a poem of great beauty and 
originality, which interprets an emotion and illustrates an 
incident the poignancy of which could scarcely be ex- 
aggerated. I have no hesitation in asserting that " A. H." 
is one of the few durable contributions to the literature of 
the present war. 

It is difficult to quote effectively from a poem which is 
constructed with great care on a complicated plan, but a 
fragment of Major Baring's elegy may lead readers to the 
original : — 

" God, Who had made you valiant, strong and swift 
And maimed you with a bullet long ago, 
And cleft your riotous ardour with a rift, 
And checked your youth's tumultuous overflow, 
Gave back your youth to you, 
And packed in moments rare and few 



Some Soldier Poets 



275 



Achievements manifold 
And happiness untold, 

And bade you spring to Death as to a bride, 

In manhood's ripeness, power and pride, 

And on your sandals the strong wings of youth/' 

There is no rhetoric here, no empty piling up of fine words ; 
it is a closely followed study in poetical biography. 

The water has its marvels like the air, but they also 
have hardly yet secured the attention of the poets. In 
A Naval Motley, by Lieut. N. M. F. Corbett, published in 
June 1916, we encounter the submarine : — 

" Not yours to know delight 

In the keen hard-fought fight, 
The shock of battle and the battle's thunder ; 

But suddenly to feel 

Deep, deep beneath the keel 
The vital blow that rives the ship asunder ! " 

A section of the new war-poetry which is particularly 
pathetic is that which is inspired by the nostalgia of home, 
by the longing in the midst of the guns and the dust and 
the lice for the silent woodlands and cool waters of England. 
When this is combined with the sense of extreme youth, 
and of a certain brave and beautiful innocence, the poig- 
nancy of it is almost more than can be borne. The judg- 
ment is hampered, and one doubts whether one's critical 
feeling can be trusted. This particular species of emotion 
is awakened by no volume more than by the slender 
Worfile Flit of E. Wyndham Tennant, who died on the 
Somme in September 1916. He was only nineteen when 
he fell, at an age when, on the one hand, more precocious 
verse than his has been written, and when yet, on the 
other, some of the greatest poets had not achieved a mastery 
of words equal to that already possessed by this young 
Wykehamist. The voice is faltering, and there is a want 
of sureness in the touch; the metrical hammer does not 



276 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



always tap the centre of the nail's head. But what pathos 
in the sentiment, what tenderness in the devotion to 
beauty ! Tennant had, we may suppose, read- Flecker 
before he wrote " How shall I tell you of the roads that 
stretch away?" ; or was it merely the family likeness 
in the generation? But I know not what but his own 
genius can have inspired the " Home Thoughts in 
Laventie," a poem about a little garden left unravished 
among the rubble of the wrecked village, a poem which 
ends thus : — 

" I saw green banks of daffodil. 
Slim poplars in the breeze, 
Great tan-brown hares in gusty March 

A-courting on the leas. 
And meadows, with their glittering streams — 

and silver-scurrying dace — 
Home, what a perfect place." 

Among these boy-poets, so cruelly and prematurely 
snatched from the paternal earth, Tennant suggests 
to us the possibility that a talent of very high order 
was quenched by death, because in few of them do we 
find so much evidence of that " perception and awe of 
Beauty 11 which Plotinus held to be the upward path to 
God. 

In June 19 17 there was published a slender volume which 
is in several ways the most puzzling and the most interesting 
of all that lie upon my table to-day. This is the Ardours 
and Endurances of Lieut. Robert Nichols. I knew nothing 
of the author save what I learned from his writings, that 
he is very young, that he went out from Oxford early in 
the war, that he was fighting in Flanders before the end 
of 1914, that he was wounded, perhaps at Loos, in 1915, 
and that he was long in hospital. I felt the hope, 
which later information has confirmed, that he was still 
alive and on the road to recovery. Before Ardours and 



Some Soldier Poets 



277 



Endurances reached me, I had met with Invocation, a 
smaller volume published by Lieut. Nichols in December 
1915. There has rarely been a more radical change in the 
character of an artist than is displayed by a comparison 
of these two collections. Invocation, in which the war 
takes a small and unconvincing place, is creditable, though 
rather uncertain, in workmanship, and displays a tendency 
towards experiment in rich fancy and vague ornament. 
In Ardours and Endurances the same accents are scarcely 
to be detected; the pleasant boy has grown into a war- 
worn man; while the mastery over the material of poetic 
art has become so remarkable as to make the epithet 

promising " otiose. There is no " promise " here; there 
is high performance. 

Alone among the poets before me, Lieut. Nichols has set 
down a reasoned sequence of war impressions. The open- 
ing Third of his book, and by far its most interesting 
section, consists of a cycle of pieces in which the personal 
experience of fighting is minutely reported, stage by stage. 
We have " The Summons/' the reluctant but unhesitating 
answer to the call in England, the break-up of plans ; then 
the farewell to home, " the place of comfort/' " The 
Approach," in three successive lyrics, describes the arrival 
at the Front. " Battle/' in eleven sections, reproduces 
the mental and physical phenomena of the attack. " The 
Dead/' in four instalments, tells the tale of grief. " The 
Aftermath/' with extraordinary skill, records in eight 
stages the gradual recovery of nerve-power after the 
shattering emotions of the fight. The first section of 
" Battle," as being shorter than the rest, may be quoted 
in full as an example of Lieut. Nichols's method : — 

" It is mid-day : the deep trench glares — 
A buzz and blaze of flies — 
The hot wind puffs the giddy airs, 
The great sun rakes the skies, 



278 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 

" No sound in all the stagnant trench 
Where forty standing men 
Endure the sweat and grit and stench, 
Like cattle in a pen. 

u Sometimes a sniper's bullet whirs 
Or twangs the whining wire ; 
Sometimes a soldier sighs and stirs 
As in hell's forging fire. 

" From out a high cool cloud descends 
An aeroplane's far moan ; 
The sun strikes down, the thin cloud rends, 
The black speck travels on. 

" And sweating, dizzied, isolate 
In the hot trench beneath, 
We bide the next shrewd move of fate 
Be it of life or death." 

This is painfully vivid, but it is far exceeded in poignancy 
by what follows. Indeed it would be difficult to find in 
all literature, from the wail of David over Jonathan down- 
ward, such an expression of the hopeless longing for an 
irrecoverable presence as informs the broken melodies, the 
stanzas which are like sobs, of the fifth section of Ardours 
and Endurances : — 

" In a far field, away from England, lies 
A Boy I friended with a care like love ; 
All day the wide earth aches, the cold wind cries, 
The melancholy clouds drive on above. 

" There, separate from him by a little span, 
Two eagle cousins, generous, reckless, free, 
Two Grenfells, lie, and my Boy is made man, 
One with these elder knights of chivalry." 

It is difficult to qualify, it seems almost indelicate to 
intrude upon, such passionate grief. These poems form a 
revelation of the agony of a spirit of superabundant refine- 
ment and native sensuousness suddenly stunned, and as 
it were momentarily petrified, by horrible spiritual anguish. 
If the strain were not relieved by the final numbers of 
" Aftermath/' where the pain of the soul is abated, and 
where the poet, scarred and shattered, but " free at last, 



Some Soldier Poets 



279 



snaps the chain of despair, these poems would be positively 
intolerable. 

In the closeness of his analysis and in the accurate 
heaping up of exact and pregnant observations, Lieut. 
Nichols comes closer than any other of these English 
poets to the best of the French paladins, of whom I 
wrote in Three French Moralists. One peculiarity which 
he shares with them is his seriousness : there is no trace 
in him of the English cheerfulness and levity. Most of 
our war-writers are incorrigible Mark Tapleys. But Lieut. 
Nichols, even when he uses colloquial phrases — and he 
introduces them with great effect — never smiles. He is 
most unlike the French, on the other hand, in his general 
attitude towards the war. He has no military enthusiasm, 
no aspiration after gloire. Indeed, the most curious feature 
of his poetry is that its range is concentrated on the few 
yards about the trench in which he stands. He seems to 
have no national view of the purpose of the war, no enthusi- 
asm for the cause, no anger against the enemy. There is 
but a single mention of the Germans from beginning to 
end; the poet does not seem to know of their existence. 
His experiences, his agonies, his despair, are what a purely 
natural phenomenon, such as the eruption of a volcano or 
the chaos of an earthquake, might cause. We might read 
his poems over and over again without forming the slightest 
idea of what all the distress was about, or who was guilty, 
or what was being defended. This is a mark of great 
artistic sincerity; but it also points to a certain moral 
narrowness. Lieut. Robert Nichols' " endurances " are 
magnificently described, but we are left in the dark regard- 
ing his " ardours." We are sure of one thing, however, 
that none of us may guess what such a talent, in one still 
so young, may have in store for us; and we may hope 
for broader views expressed in no less burning accents. 

There could hardly be a more vivid contrast than exists 



280 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



between the melancholy passion of Lieut. Nichols and the 
fantastic high spirits of Captain Robert Graves. He again 
is evidently a very young man, who was but yester-year a 
jolly boy at the Charterhouse. He has always meant to 
be a poet; he is not one of those who have been driven 
into verse by the strenuous emotion of the war. In 
some diverting prefatory lines to Over the Brazier he gives 
us a picture of the nursery-scene when a bright green- 
covered book bewitched him by its " metre twisting like a 
chain of daisies, with great big splendid words." He has 
still a wholesome hunger for splendid words ; he has kept 
more deliberately than most of his compeers a poetical 
vocation steadily before him. He has his moments of 
dejection when the first battle faces him : — 

" Here's an end to my art ! 
I must die and I know it, 
With battle-murder at my heart — 
Sad death for a poet ! 

" Oh, my songs never sung, 

And my plays to darkness blown ! 
I am still so young, so young, 
And life was my own." 

But this mood soon passes, and is merged in the humoristic 
and fantastic elation characteristic of this buoyant writer, 
whose whim it is to meet the tragedy not mournfully but 
boisterously. Where by most of the soldier-bards the 
subjective manner is a little over-done, it is impossible 
not to welcome so objective a writer as Captain Graves, 
from whose observations of the battle of La Bassee I quote 
an episode : — 

The Dead Fox Hunter 

" We found the little captain at the head ; 
His men lay well aligned. 
We touched his hand, stone-cold, and he was dead, 
And they, all dead behind, 
Had never reached their goal, but they died well ; 
They charged in line, and in the same line fell, 



Some Soldier Poets 



281 



" The well-known rosy colours of his face 
Were almost lost in grey. 
We saw that, dying and in hopeless case, 
For others' sake that day 
He'd smothered all rebellious groans : in death 
His fingers were tight clenched between his teeth. 

" For those who live uprightly and die true 
Heaven has no bars or locks, 
And serves all taste ... Or what's for him to do 
Up there, but hunt the fox ? 
Angelic choirs ? No, Justice must provide 
For one who rode straight and at hunting died. 

" So if Heaven had no Hunt before he came, 
Why, it must find one now : 
If any shirk and doubt they know the game, 
There's one to teach them how : 
And the whole host of Seraphim complete 
Must jog in scarlet to his opening Meet." 

I have a notion that this is a gallant poem which 
Englishmen will not allow to be forgotten. The great 
quality of Captain Graves' verse at present is its elated 
vivacity, which neither fire, nor pain, nor grief can long 
subdue. Acutely sensitive to all these depressing elements, 
his animal spirits lift him like an aeroplane, ancl he is above 
us in a moment, soaring through clouds of nonsense under 
a sky of unruffled gaiety. In our old literature, of which 
he is plainly a student, he has found a neglected author 
who is wholly to his taste. This is Skelton, Henry VIII/ s 
Rabelaisian laureate. Captain Graves imitates, with a 
great deal of bravado, those breathless absurdities, The 
Tunning of Elinore Rummyng and Colin Clout. He 
likes rough metre, bad rhymes and squalid images : we 
suspect him of an inclination to be rude to his immediate 
predecessors. But his extreme modernness — " Life is a 
cliche — I would find a gesture of my own" — is, in the 
case of so lively a songster, an evidence of vitality. He 
promises a new volume, to be called Fairies and Fusiliers^ 
and it will be looked forward to with anticipation, 



282 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



All these poets seem to be drawn into relation to one 

another. Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon are both 
Fusiliers, and they publish a o-TixopvOla " on Nonsense/' 
just as Cowley and Crashaw did " on Hope" two centuries 
and a half ago. Lieut. Sassoon' s own volume is later than 
those which we have hitherto examined, and bears a some- 
what different character. The gallantry of 1915 and the 
optimism of 1916 have passed away, and in Lieut. Sassoon' s 
poems their place is taken by a sense of intolerable weari- 
ness and impatience: " How long, O Lord, how long?" 
The name-piece of the volume, and perhaps its first in execu- 
tion, is a monologue by an ignorant and shrewd old hunts- 
man, who looks back over his life with philosophy and 
regret. Like Captain Graves, he is haunted with the idea 
that there must be fox-hounds in Heaven. All Lieut. 
Sassoon' s poems about horses and hunting and country 
life generally betray his tastes and habits. This particular 
poem hardly touches on the war, but those which follow 
are absorbed by the ugliness, lassitude, and horror of 
fighting. Lj^ut. Sassoon' s verse has not yet secured the 
quality of perfection; he is not sufficiently alive to the 
importance of always hitting upon the best and only word. 
He is essentially a satirist, and sometimes a very bold 
one, as in " The Hero," where the death of a soldier is 
announced home in " gallant lies," so that his mother 
brags to her neighbours of the courage of her dead son. 
At the close of all this pious make-believe, the Colonel 

" thought how ' Jack,' cold-footed, useless swine, 
Had panicked down the trench that night the mine 
Went up at Wicked Corner ; how he'd tried 
To get sent home ; and how, at last, he died, 
Blown to small bits " ; 

or, again, as in " Blighters," where the sentimentality of 
London is contrasted with the reality in Flanders : 



Some Soldier Poets 



283 



" The House is crammed : tier beyond tier they grin 
And cackle at the Show, while prancing ranks 
Of harlots shrill the chorus, drunk with din, 

' We're sure the Kaiser loves the dear old Tanks ! ' 

"I'd like to see a Tank come down the stalls, 

Lurching to rag-time tunes, or ' Home, sweet Home ! ' — 
And there' d be no more jokes in Music-halls 
To mock the riddled corpses round Bapaume." 

It is this note of bitter anger, miles away from the 
serenity of Rupert Brooke, the lion-heart of Julian Grenfell, 
the mournful passion of Robert Nichols, which differentiates 
Lieut. Sassoon from his fellows. They accept the war, 
with gallantry or with resignation; he detests it with 
wrathful impatience. He has much to learn as an artist, 
for his diction is often hard, and he does not always 
remember that Horace, " when he writ on vulgar subjects, 
yet writ not vulgarly/ ' But he has force, sincerity, and a 
line of his own in thought and fancy. A considerable section 
of his poetry is occupied with studies of men he has observed 
at the Front, a subaltern, a private of the Lancashires, 
conscripts, the dross of a battle-field, the one-legged man 
(" Thank God, they had to amputate ! "), the sniper who 
goes crazy — savage, disconcerting silhouettes drawn roughly 
against a lurid background. 

The bitterness of Lieut. Sassoon is not cynical, it is the 
rage of disenchantment, the violence of a young man eager 
to pursue other aims, who, finding the age out of joint, 
resents being called upon to help to mend it. His temper 
is not altogether to be applauded, for such sentiments 
must tend to relax the effort of the struggle, yet they can 
hardly be reproved when conducted with so much honesty 
and courage. Lieut. Sassoon, who, as we learn, has twice 
been severely wounded and has been in the very furnace 
of the fighting, has reflected, more perhaps than his fellow- 
singers, about the causes and conditions of the war. He 
may not always have thought correctly, nor have recorded 



284 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



his impressions with proper circumspection, but his honesty 

must be respectfully acknowledged. 

I have now called attention to those soldier-writers 
of verse who, in my judgment, expressed themselves 
with most originality during the war. There is a temp- 
tation to continue the inquiry, and to expatiate on 
others of only less merit and promise. Much could be said 
of Charles Hamilton Sorley, who gave evidence of preco- 
cious literary talent, though less, I think, in verse, since 
the unmistakable singing faculty is absent in Marl- 
borough (Cambridge University Press, 1916), than in 
prose, a form in which he already excelled. Sorley must 
have shown military gifts as well as a fine courage, for 
when he was killed in action in October 1915, although he 
was but twenty years of age, he had been promoted captain. 
In the universal sorrow, few figures awaken more regret 
than his. Something, too, had I space, should be said 
about the minstrels who have been less concerned with 
the delicacies of workmanship than with stirring the pulses 
of their auditors. In this kind of lyric " A Leaping Wind 
from England" will long keep fresh the name of W. N. 
Hodgson, who was killed in the battle of the Somme. His 
verses were collected in November 19 16. The strange, 
rough drum-taps of Mr. Henry Lawson, published in 
Sydney at the close of 1915, and those of Mr. Lawrence 
Rentoul, testify to Australian enthusiasm. Most of the 
soldier-poets were quite youthful; an exception was 
R. E. Vernede, whose War Poems (W. Heinemann, 1917) 
show the vigour of moral experience. He was killed in 
the attack on Harrincourt, in April 1917, having nearly 
closed his forty-second year. To pursue the list would 
only be to make my omissions more invidious. 

There can be no healthy criticism where the principle of 
selection is neglected, and I regret that patriotism or indul- 
gence has tempted so many of those who have spoken of 



Some Soldier Poets 285 



the war-poets of the day to plaster them with indiscriminate 
praise. I have here mentioned a few, in whose honour even 
a little excess of laudation may not be out of place. But 
these are the exceptions, in a mass of standardised poetry 
made to pattern, loosely versified, respectable in sentiment, 
uniformly meditative, and entirely without individual 
character. The reviewers who applaud all these ephemeral 
efforts with a like acclaim, and who say that there are 
hundreds of poets now writing who equal if they do not 
excel the great masters of the past, talk nonsense; they 
talk nonsense, and they know it. They lavish their 
flatteries in order to widen the circle of their audience. 
They are like the prophets of Samaria, who declared good 
unto the King of Israel with one mouth ; and we need a 
Micaiah to clear the scene of all such flatulent Zedekiahs. 
It is not true that the poets of the youngest generation are 
a myriad Shelleys and Burnses and B6rangers rolled into 
one. But it is true that they carry on the great tradition 
of poetry with enthusiasm, and a few of them with high 
accomplishment. 



1917- 



THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH 
POETRY 



THE FUTURE OF ENGLISH 



POETRY 1 

" J'ai vu le cheval rose ouvrir ses ailes d'or, 
Et, flairant le laurier que je tenais encor, 
Verdoyant a jamais, hier comme aujourd'hui, 
Se cabrer vers le Jour et ruer vers la Nuit."^ 

Henri de Regnier. 

In venturing this afternoon to address an audience 
accustomed to listen to those whose positive authority is 
universally recognised, and in taking for my theme a 
subject not, like theirs, distinct in its definitions or con- 
secrated by tradition and history, I am aware that I 
perform what you may, if you choose, call an act of blame- 
worthy audacity. My subject is chimerical, vague, and 
founded on conjectures which you may well believe your- 
selves at least as well fitted as I am to propound. 'Never- 
theless, and in no rash or paradoxical spirit, I invite you 
to join with me in some reflections on what is the probable 
course of English poetry during, let us say, the next 
hundred years. If I happen to be right, I hope some of 
the youngest persons present will say, when I am long 
turned to dust, what an illuminating prophet I was. If 
I happen to be wrong, why, no one will remember any- 
thing at all about the matter. In any case we may possibly 
be rewarded this afternoon by some agreeable hopes and 
by the contemplation of some pleasant analogies. 

Our title takes for granted that English poetry will 

1 Address delivered before the English Association, May 30, 
1913. 

U 289 



290 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



continue, with whatever fluctuations, to be a living and 

abiding thing. This I must suppose that you all accede 
to, and that you do not look upon poetry as an art which 

is finished, or the harvest of classic verse as one which is 
fully reaped and garnered. That has been believed at one 
time and another, in various parts of the globe. I will 
mention one instance in the history of our own time : a 
quarter of a century ago, the practice of writing verse was 
deliberately abandoned in the literatures of the three 
Scandinavian countries, but particularly in that of Norway, 
where no poetry, in our sense, was written from about 
1873 to 1885. It almost died out here in England in the 
middle of the fifteenth century ; it ran very low in France 
at the end of the Middle Ages. But all these instances, 
whether ancient or modern, of the attempt to prove prose 
a sufficing medium for all expression of human thought 
have hitherto failed, and it is now almost certain that 
they will more and more languidly be revived, and with 
less and less conviction. 

It was at one of the deadliest moments in the life of the 
art in England that George Gascoigne remarked, in his 
Epistle to the Reverend Divine (1574) that " It seemeth 
unto me that in all ages Poetry hath been not only per- 
mitted, but also it hath been thought a right good thing. ,, 
Poetry has occupied the purest and the fieriest minds in 
all ages, and you will remember that Plato, who excluded 
the poets from his philosophical Utopia, was nevertheless 
an exquisite writer of lyrical verse himself. So, to come 
down to our own day, Ibsen, who drove poetry out of the 
living language, of his country, had been one of the most 
skilful of prosodical proficients. Such instances may allay 
our alarm. There cannot be any lasting force in arguments 
which remind us of the pious confessions of a redeemed 
burglar. It needs more than the zeal of a turncoat to 
drive Apollo out of Parnassus. 



The Future of English Poetry 291 



There will, therefore, we may be sure, continue to be 
English poetry written and printed. Can we form any 
idea of the probable character of it ? There exists, in private 
hands, a picture by that ingenious water-colour painter of 
the late eighteenth century, William Gilpin. It is very 
fantastic, and means what you like, but it represents 
Pegasus, the horse of the Muses, careering in air on the vast 
white arc of his wings, against a sky so dark that it must 
symbolise the obscure discourse of those who write in prose. 
You are left quite doubtful whether he will strike the rocky 
terrace in the foreground with his slender, silver hooves, 
or will swoop down into the valley below, or will soar to 
heaven and out of sight. You are left by the painter in 
a pleasant uncertainty, but Hippocrene may , break out 
anywhere, and of the vivacious courser himself all that 
we can be sure of is that we are certain to see him alighting 
before us when we least expect him. 

We may put our trust in the persistence of Pegasus 
through his apparently aimless gyrations, and in the 
elasticity of the poetical spirit, and yet acknowledge that 
there are difficulties in the way of believing that verse 
will continue to be written in the English language for a 
quite indefinite period. Perhaps we may as well face one 
or two of these difficulties at once. The principal danger, 
then, to the future of poetry seems to me to rest in the 
necessity of freshness of expression. Every school of verse 
is a rising and a breaking wave. It rises, because its 
leaders have become capable of new forms of attractive 
expression; its crest is some writer, or several writers, of 
genius, who combine skill and fire and luck at a moment 
of extreme opportuneness; and then the wave breaks, 
because later writers cannot support the ecstasy, and merely 
repeat formulas which have lost their attractiveness. 
Shirley would have been a portent, if he had flourished 
in 1595 and had written then as he did in 1645. Erasmus 



292 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



Darwin would be one of the miracles of prosody if The 

Loves of the Plants could be dated 1689 instead of 1789. 
There must always be this fluctuation, this rise and fall 
in value, and what starts each new wave mounting out of 
the trough of the last is the instinctive demand for fresh- 
ness of expression. Cantate Domino is the cry of youth, 
sing a new song unto the Lord. 

But with the superabundant circulation of language 
year after year, week after week, by a myriad careful 
scribes, the possibilities of freshness grow rarer and rarer. 
The obvious, simple, poignant things seem to have all 
been said. It is not merely that the actual poems, like 
Gray's Elegy, and much of Hamlet, and some of Burns' s 
songs, have been manipulated so often, and put to such 
pedestrian uses, that they are like rubbed coins, and 
begin to lose the very features of Apollo and the script 
of the Muses, but that the road seems closed to future 
bards who wish to speak with simplicity of similar straight- 
forward things. In several of the literatures of modern 
Europe — those which began late, or struggled long against 
great disadvantages — it is still possible to produce pleasure 
by poems which describe primitive emotions in perfectly 
limpid language. But with us in England, I confess that 
it seems to me certain that whatever we retain, we can 
never any more have patience to listen to a new shepherd 
piping under the hawthorn-tree. Each generation is likely 
to be more acutely preoccupied than the last with the 
desire for novelty of expression. Accordingly, the sense of 
originality, which is so fervently demanded from every new 
school of writers, will force the poets of the future to sweep 
away all recognised impressions. The consequence must be, 
I think — I confess so far as language is concerned that I see 
no escape from this — that the natural uses of English and the 
obvious forms of our speech will be driven from our national 
poetry, as they are even now so generally being driven. 



The Future of English Poetry 293 



No doubt, in this condition, the originality of those who 
do contrive to write strongly and clearly will be more 
vigorously evident than ever. The poets will have to gird 
up their loins and take their sword in their hands. That 
wise man of the eighteenth century, to whom we never 
apply without some illuminating response, recommends 
that T< Qui saura penser de lui-meme et former de nobles 
idees, qu'il prenne, s'il peut, la maniere et le tour eleve 
des maitres." These are words which should inspire 
every new aspirant to the laurel. " S'il pent" ; you see 
that Vauvenargues puts it so, because he does not wish 
that we should think that such victories as these are easy, 
or that any one else can help us to produce them. They 
are not easy, and they will be made more and more hard 
by the rubbed-out, conventionalised coinage of our language. 

In this matter I think it probable that the little peoples 
and the provinces which cultivate a national speech, will 
long find a great facility in expressing themselves in verse. 
I observe that it has recently been stated that Wales, 
which has always teemed with vernacular poets, has never 
possessed so many as she does at this time. I am debarred 
by what Keats called " giant ignorance " from expressing 
an opinion on the subject, but I presume that in Welsh 
the resources of language are far from being so seriously 
exhausted as we have seen that they are in our own com- 
plicated sphere, where the cultivation of all the higher 
forms of poetic diction through five centuries has made 
simple expression extremely difficult. I am therefore 
ready to believe that in Welsh, as in Gaelic and in Erse, 
the poets have still wide fields of lyric, epic, and dramatic 
art untilled. We have seen, in the latter half of the nine- 
teenth century, Provengal poets capable of producing simple 
and thrilling numbers which are out of the reach of their 
sophisticated brethren who employ the worn locutions of 
the French language. 



294 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



In new generations there is likely, we may be sure, to 
occur less description of plain material objects, because the 
aspect of these has already received every obvious tribute. 
So also there can hardly fail to be less precise enumeration 
of the primitive natural emotions, because this also has 
been done already, and repeated to satiety. It will not 
any longer satisfy to write 

" The rose is red, the violet blue, 
And both are sweet, and so are you." 

Reflections of this order were once felt to be exquisite, and 
they were so still as lately as when Blake and Wordsworth 
were young. But it is quite impossible that we should 
ever go back to them. Future poets will seek to analyse 
the redness of the rose, and will scout, as a fallacious 
observation, the statement that the violet is blue. All 
schemes of art become mechanical and insipid, and even 
their naivetes lose their savour. Verse of excellent quality, 
in this primitive manner, can now be written to order by 
any smart little boy in a Grammar-school. 

We have agreed, however, to believe that poetry, as an 
art, in one shape or another, will escape from the bank- 
ruptcy of language, and that Pegasus, with whatever strange 
and unexpected gambollings, will continue to accompany 
us. But of one thing we may be quite sure, that it will 
only be at the cost of much that we at present admire and 
enjoy that the continuity of the art of verse will be preserved. 
If I could suddenly present to you some characteristic 
passages of the best English poetry of 1963, I doubt ex- 
tremely whether I should be able to persuade you of their 
merit. I am not sure that you would understand what 
the poet intended to convey, any more than the Earl of 
Surrey would have understood the satires of Donne, or 
Coleridge have enjoyed the odes of George Meredith. 
Young minds invariably display their vitality by attacking 



The Future of English Poetry 295 



the accepted forms of expression, and then they look about 
for novelties, which they cultivate with what seems to 
their elders to be extravagance. Before we attempt to 
form an idea, however shadowy, of what poetry will be 
in the future, we must disabuse ourselves of the delusion 
that it will be a repetition of what is now produced and 
accepted. Nor can we hope by any exercise of philosophy 
to do away with the embarrassing and painful, but after 
all perhaps healthful antagonism between those who look 
forward and those who live in the past. The earnestness 
expended on new work will always render young men 
incapable of doing justice to what is a very little older 
than themselves; and the piety with which the elderly 
regard what gave them full satisfaction in their days of 
emotional freshness will always make it difficult for them 
to be just to what seems built on the ruins of what they 
loved. 

If there is any feature which we can scarcely be wrong 
in detecting in our vision of the poetry of the future it is 
an elaboration which must follow on the need for novelty 
of which I have spoken. I expect to find the modern poet 
accepting more or less consciously an ever-increasing sym- 
bolic subtlety of expression. If we could read his verses, 
which are still unwritten, I feel sure that we should con- 
sider them obscure. That is to say, we should find that 
in his anxiety not to repeat what had been said before him, 
and in his horror of the trite and the superficial, he will 
achieve effect and attach interest obscuris vera involvens — 
wrapping the truth in darkness. The " darkness " will be 
relative, as his own contemporaries, being more instructed 
and sophisticated than we are, will find those things trans- 
parent, or at least translucent, which remain opaque 
enough to us. And, of course, as epithets and adjectives 
that seem fresh to us will smell of the inkhorn to him, 
he will have to exert his ingenuity to find parallel expres- 



296 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



sions which would startle us by their oddity if we met 

with them now. 

A danger, therefore, which the poets of the future will 
need all their ingenuity to avoid, will be the cultivation 
of a patent artificiality, a forcing of the note until it ceases 
to rouse an echo in the human heart. There will be a deter- 
mination to sweep away all previously recognised impres- 
sions. Affectation, that is to say the obtaining of an effect 
by illegitimate means, is an offence against the Muses 
which they never fail to avenge by oblivion or by a curtailed 
and impeded circulation. We may instructively examine 
the history of literature with special attention to this 
fault, and we find it in all cases to have been fatal. It 
was fatal to the poetry of Alexandria, which closed, as 
you know, in an obscurity to which the title of Lycophrontic 
darkness has been given from the name of its most ex- 
travagant exponent. It was fatal to several highly-gifted 
writers of the close of the Elizabethan period, who en- 
deavoured to give freshness to an outworn scheme of poetic 
ornament; I need only remind you of the impenetrable 
cloud or fog, by Cyril Tourneur, called The Transform' d 
Metamorphosis, and of the cryptic rhymed dramas of Lord 
Brooke. It has not been fatal, I hope, but I think desper- 
ately perilous to a beautiful talent of our own age, the 
amiable Stephane Mallarme. Nothing, I feel, is more 
dangerous to the health of poetry than the praise given 
by a group of irresponsible disciples to verse which transfers 
commonplace thought to an exaggerated, violent, and 
involved scheme of diction, and I confess that I should 
regard the future of poetry in this country with much 
more apprehension than I do, if I believed that the purely 
learned poet, the prosodical pedant, was destined to become 
paramount amongst us. That would, indeed, threaten 
the permanence of the art ; and it is for this reason that 
I look with a certain measure of alarm on the excess of 



The Future of English Poetry 297 



verbiage about versification which attends not merely 
criticism — for that matters little — but the actual production 
and creation. I am confident, however, that the common 
sense of readers will always bring about a reaction in 
favour of sanity and lucidity. 

One great objection to the introduction of a tortured 
and affected style into verse-writing is the sacrifice which 
has to be made of that dignity and sweetness, that suave 
elevation, which marks all successful masterpieces. Per- 
haps as difficult a quality to attain as any which the poetry 
of the future will be called upon to study is stateliness, 
what the French call " la vraie hauteur/' This elevation 
of style, this dignity, is foreign to democracies, and it is 
hard to sustain it in the rude air of modern life. It easily 
degenerates, as Europe saw it degenerate for a century 
and a half, into pomposity relieved by flatness. It is apt 
to become a mere sonorous rhetoric, a cultivation of empty 
fine phrases. If we examine the serious poetry of the 
end of the seventeenth and the greater part of the eighteenth 
century — especially in the other countries of Europe, for 
England was never without some dew on the threshing- 
floor — if we examine it in France, for instance, between 
Racine and Andre Chenier, we are obliged to recognise 
that it was very rarely both genuine and appropriate. 
The Romantic Revival, which we are beginning ungratefully 
to decry, did at least restore to poetry the sense of a genuine 
stateliness of expression, which once more gave it the 
requisite dignity, and made it a vehicle for the vital and 
the noble sentiments of humanity. 

Let us now turn, in our conjectural survey, from the 
form to the subjects with which the poetry of the future 
is likely to be engaged. Here we are confronted with the 
fact that, if we examine the whole of history, we see that 
the domain of verse has been persistently narrowed by 
the incursions of a more and more powerful and wide 



298 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



embracing prose. At the dawn of civilisation poetry had 
it all its own way. If instruction was desired upon any 
sphere of human knowledge or energy, the bard produced 
it in a prosodical shape, combining with the dignity of 
form the aid which the memory borrowed from a pattern 
or a song. Thus you conceive of a Hesiod before you 
think of a Homer, and the earliest poetry was probably 
of a purely didactic kind. As time went on, prose, with 
its exact pedestrian method, took over more and more 
completely the whole province of information, but it was 
not until the nineteenth century that the last strongholds 
of the poetry of instruction were stormed. I will, if you 
please, bring this home to you by an example which may 
surprise you. 

The subject which I have taken the liberty of discussing 
with you this afternoon has not often occupied the serious 
attention of critics. But it was attempted, by no less a 
person than Wordsworth, more than a hundred years ago. 
I make no excuse for repeating to you the remarkable 
passage in which he expressed his convictions in the famous 
Preface of 1800 : — 

" If the labours of men of science, — Wordsworth said, — 
should ever create any material revolution, direct or indirect, 
in our condition, and in the impressions which we habitually 
receive, the Poet will sleep then no more than at present ; 
he will be ready to follow the steps of the Man of Science, 
not only in those general indirect effects, but he will be at 
his side, carrying sensation into the midst of the objects 
of the science itself. The remotest discoveries of the 
Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper 
objects of the Poet's art as any upon which it can be 
employed, if the time should ever come when these things 
shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which 
they are contemplated by the followers of these respective 



The Future of English Poetry 299 



sciences, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put 
on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend 
his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome 
the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate 
of the household of man." 

It is plain, then, that, writing in the year 1800, Words- 
worth believed that a kind of modified and sublimated 
didactic poetry would come into vogue in the course of 
the nineteenth century. He stood on the threshold of a 
new age, and he cast his vatic gaze across it much in the 
same spirit as we are trying to do to-day. But if any 
warning were needed to assure us of the vanity of prophesy- 
ing, it would surely be the error of one so sublimely gifted 
and so enriched with the spoils of meditation. The belief 
of Wordsworth was that the poetry of the future would 
deal, in some vaguely inspired fashion, with the discoveries 
of science. But when we look back over the field of 113 
years, how much do we find our national poetry enriched 
with ore from the mines of mineralogy or botany or 
chemistry? It is difficult to see that there has been so 
much as an effort made to develop poetry in this or in 
any similar direction. Perhaps the nearest approach to 
what Wordsworth conceived as probable was attempted 
by Tennyson, particularly in those parts of In Memoriam 
where he dragged in analogies to geological discoveries and 
the biological theories of his time. Well, these are just 
those parts of Tennyson which are now most universally 
repudiated as lifeless and jejune. 

Wordsworth did not confine himself to predicting a revival 
of didactic poetry, the poetry of information, such as, in a 
very crude form, had prevailed all over Europe in his own 
childhood, but he conceived a wide social activity for 
writers of verse. He foresaw that the Poet would " bind 
together by passion and knowledge the vast empire of 



300 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



human society, as it is spread over the whole earth, and 
over all time." I suppose that in composing those huge 
works, so full of scattered beauties, but in their entirety 
so dry and solid, The Excursion and The Prelude, he 
was consciously attempting to inaugurate this scheme 
of a wide and all-embracing social poetry. Nor do I 
suppose that efforts of this kind will ever cease to be 
made. We have seen a gifted writer in whom the memory 
is perhaps even more surprisingly developed than the 
imagination, employ the stores of his experience to enrich 
a social poetry the elements of which, prima facie, should 
be deeply attractive to us all. But I do not know that 
the experiments of Mr. Rudyard Kipling, brilliant as they 
are, are calculated to encourage the poets of the future 
to pursue their lyric celebration of machinery and sociology 
and the mysteries of natural religion. Already is it not 
that portion of his work which we approach with most 
languor, in spite of its originality and its outlook upon 
" the vast empire of human society " ? And lesser poets 
than he who seek for popularity by such violent means 
are not, I think, rewarded by the distinguished loyalty of 
the best readers. We are startled by their novelty, and 
we admire them for the moment; but when, a few years 
later, we return to them, we are apt to observe with distress 
how 

" their lean and flashy songs 
Grate on their scrannel pipes of wretched straw." 

If, therefore, I venture upon a prophecy, where all the 
greater prophets, my predecessors, have failed, it is to 
suggest that the energy "of future poets will not be largely 
exercised on themes of this intrepid social character, but 
that as civilisation more and more tightly lays hold upon 
literature, and excludes the purest form of it from one 
province after another, poetry will, in its own defence, 
cultivate more and more what Hazlitt calls " a mere 



The Future of English Poetry 301 



effusion of natural sensibility.' ' Hazlitt used the phrase 
in derision, but we may accept it seriously, and not shrink 
from adopting it. In most public remarks about current 
and coming literature in the abstract, I marvel at the 
confidence with which it is taken for granted that the 
sphere of interest occupied by writers of the imagination 
is sure to grow wider and wider. It is expected to embrace 
the world, to take part in a universal scheme of pacification, 
to immortalise imperial events, to be as public as possible. 
But surely it is more and more clearly proved that prose 
is the suitable medium for such grandiose themes as these. 
Within the last year our minds have been galvanised into 
collective sympathy by two great sensations of catastrophe, 
each case wearing the most thrilling form that tragedy 
can take in the revolt of nature against the feverish advances 
of mankind. I suppose we may consider the destruction 
of the Titanic and the loss of Captain Scott's expedition 
as two absolutely typical examples of what is thought by 
journalists to be fitting material for poetry. Yet by 
common consent, these tragic occurrences did not awaken 
our numerous poets to any really remarkable effort, lyrical 
or elegiac. No ode or threnody could equal in vibrating 
passion Captain Scott's last testament. These are matters 
in which the fullness of a wholly sincere statement in prose 
does not require, does not even admit, the introduction of 
the symbol. The impact of the sentiments of horror and 
pity is too sudden and forcible. 

My own view is that, whether to its advantage or not, 
the poetry of the future is likely to be very much occupied 
with subjects, and with those alone, which cannot be 
expressed in the prose of the best-edited newspaper. In 
fact, if I were to say what it is which I think coming poets 
will have more and more to be on their guard against, I 
should define it as a too rigid determination never to 
examine subjects which are of collective interest to the 



302 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



race at large. I dread lest the intense cultivation of the 
Ego, in minutest analysis and microscopical observation 

of one's self, should become the sole preoccupation of the 
future poet. I will not tell you that I dread lest this 
should be one of his principal preoccupations, for that 
would be to give way to a cheery piece of mid-Victorian 
hypocrisy which would be unworthy of you and of me 
alike. The time is past when intelligent persons ought 
to warn writers of the imagination not to cultivate self- 
analysis, since it is the only safeguard against the follies 
of an unbridled romanticism. But although the ivory 
tower offers a most valuable retreat, and although the 
poets may be strongly recommended to prolong their 
villeggiatura there, it should not be the year-long habitation 
of any healthy intelligence. 

I do not question that the closing up of the poetic field, 
the depending more and more completely for artistic effect 
upon an " effusion of natural sensibility," will isolate the 
poet from his fellows. He will be tempted, in the pursuit 
of the symbol which illustrates his emotion, to draw farther 
and farther away from contact with the world. He will 
wrap his singing-robes not over his limbs only, but over his 
face, and treat his readers with exemplary disdain. We 
must be prepared, or our successors must, to find frequently 
revealed the kind of poet who not merely sees nothing 
superior to himself, but nothing except himself. I am not 
concerned to say that this will be unfortunate or blame- 
worthy; the moralist of the future must attend to that. 
But I can believe that this unyielding and inscrutable 
attitude may produce some fine artistic effects. I can 
believe that both intensity and dignity may be gained by 
this sacrifice of the plainer human responsibilities, although 
I am not prepared to say at what loss of other qualities. 
It is clear that such a writer will not allow the public to 
dictate to him the nature or form of his lyric message, 



The Future of English Poetry 303 



and he will have to depend for success entirely on the 
positive value of his verse. 

The isolation of the poets of the future is likely to lead 
them to band themselves more closely together for mutual 
protection against the reasonable world. The mystery of 
verse is like other abstruse and recondite mysteries — it 
strikes the ordinary fleshly man as absurd. The claim of 
the poet on human sympathy, if we regard it merely from 
the world's standpoint, is gratuitous, vague, and silly. In 
an entirely sensible and well-conducted social system, 
what place will there be for the sorrows of Tasso and Byron, 
for the rage of Dante, for the misanthropy of Alfred de 
Vigny, for the perversity of Verlaine, for the rowdiness of 
Marlowe? — the higher the note of the lyre, the more 
ridiculous is the attitude of the lyrist, and the coarse public 
applauds the violence of Diogenes when he tramples on 
the pride of the poets with a greater pride than theirs. I 
cannot help thinking that this attitude of the sacred bard, 
maundering from the summit of his ivory tower, and 
hollowed out and made haggard by a kind of sublime 
moral neuralgia, will have to be abandoned as a relic of the 
dead romantic past. So far as it is preserved by the poets 
of the future it will be peculiar to those monasteries of song, 
those " little clans," of which I am now about to speak 
as likely more and more to prevail. 

In France, where the interest in poetry has, during the 
last generation, been far more keen and more abundant 
than anywhere else in the world, we already see a tendency 
to the formation of such experimental houses of song. 
There has been hitherto no great success attending any 
one of these bodies, which soon break up, but the effort 
to form them is perhaps instructive. I took considerable 
interest in the Abbaye de Creteil, which was a collectivist 
experiment of this kind. It was founded in October 1906, 
and it was dissolved in consequence of internal dissensions 



304 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



in January 1908. It was an attempt to create, in defiance 
of the public, in contemptuous disregard of established 
" literary opinion/ ' a sort of prosodical chapel or school 
of poetry. It was to be the active centre of energy for a 
new generation, and there were five founders, each of 
whom was highly ambitious to distinguish himself in verse. 
At Creteil there was a printing-press in a great park, so 
that the members should be altogether independent of the 
outside world. The poets were to cultivate the garden 
and keep house with the sale of the produce. When not 
at work, there were recitations, discussions, exhibitions of 
sketches, for they were mixed up with the latest vagaries 
of the Cubists and Post-impressionists. 

This particular experiment lasted only fifteen months, 
and I cannot conscientiously say that I think it was in any 
way a success. No one among the abbatical founders of 
Creteil had, to be quite frank, any measure of talent in 
proportion to his daring. They were involved in vague 
and nebulous ideas, mixed up with what I am afraid I 
must call charlatans, the refuse and the wreckage of other 
arts. Yet I consider that it is interesting to note that the 
lay monks of Creteil were in a sense correct when they 
announced that they were performing " a heroic act," an 
act symbolical of the way in which poetry would in the 
future disdainfully protect itself against the invasion of 
common sense, the dreadful impact of the sensual world. 
I think you will do well, if you wish to pursue the subject 
of our conjectural discourse, to keep your eye on this 
tendency to a poetical collectivism. We have not noticed 
much evidence of it yet in England, but it is beginning to 
stir a good deal in France and Italy. After all, the highest 
poetry is a mysterious thing, like the practices of the 
Society of Rosicrucians, of whom it was said, " Our House 
of the Holy Ghost, though a hundred thousand men should 
have looked upon it, is yet doomed to remain untouched, 



The Future of English Poetry 305 



imperturbable, .out of sight, and unrevealed to the whole 
godless world for ever." If I am sure of anything, it is 
that the Poets of the Future will look upon massive schemes 
of universal technical education, and such democratic 
reforms as those which are now occupying the enthusiasm 
and energy of Lord Haldane, as peculiarly hateful 
expositions of the godlessness of a godless world. 

To turn to another branch of our subject, it appears 
to me possible that sexual love may cease to be the pre- 
dominant theme in the lyrical poetry of the future. Erotic 
sentiment has perhaps unduly occupied the imaginative 
art of the past. In particular, the poets of the late nine- 
teenth century were interested to excess in love. There 
was a sort of obsession of sex among them, as though life 
presented no other phenomenon worthy of the attention 
of the artist. All over Europe, with the various tincture 
of differing national habit and custom, this was the mark 
of the sophistication of the poets, sometimes delicately 
and craftily exhibited, but often, as in foreign examples 
which will easily occur to your memory, rankly, as with 
the tiresome persistence of a slightly stale perfume, an 
irritating odour of last night's opopanax or vervain. And 
this is the one point, almost I think the only point, in 
which the rather absurd and certainly very noisy and 
hoydenish manifestoes of the so-called Futurists, led by 
M. Marinetti and his crew of iconoclasts, are worthy of our 
serious attention. It is a plank in their platform to banish 
eroticism, of the good kind and of the bad, from the 
poetic practice of the future. I do not, to say the truth, 
find much help for the inquiry we have taken up to-day, 
in the manifestoes of these raucous young gentlemen, who, 
when they have succeeded in flinging the ruins of the 
architecture of Venice into its small stinking canals, 
will find themselves hard put to it to build anything 
beautiful in the place of them. But in their reaction against 
X 



306 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



" the eternal feminine," they may, I think, very possibly 

be followed by the serious poets of the future. 

Those who have watched rather closely the recent develop- 
ments of poetry in England have been struck with the fact 
that it tends more and more in the direction of the dramatic, 
not necessarily in the form of what is known as pure drama, 
particularly adapted for representation to listening audiences 
behind the footlights, but in the increased study of life in 
its exhibitions of energy. This may seem to be inconsistent 
with the tendency, of which I spoke just now, to withdraw 
from the world itself, either into an egotistical isolation or 
into some cloistered association of more or less independent 
figures united only in a rebellious and contemptuous disdain 
of public opinion. But the inconsistency may very well 
be one solely in appearance. It may well happen that the 
avoidance of all companionship with the stereotyped social 
surfaces of life, the ignorance — really, the happy and 
hieratic ignorance — of what " people/ ' in the fussy sense, 
are supposed to be saying and doing, may actually help 
the poet to come more fruitfully and penetratingly to what 
lies under the surface, to what is essential and permanent 
and notable in the solid earth of human character. Hence, 
I think it not improbable that the poetry of the future 
may become more and more dramatic, although perhaps 
by a series of acts of definite creation, rather than as the 
result of observation, which will be left to the ever-increasing 
adroitness of the brilliant masters of our prose. 

As a result of this obsession in creative drama, I suppose 
that we may expect to find in the poetry of the future a 
more steady hope for mankind than has up to the present 
time been exhibited. The result of an excessive observation 
of the startling facts of life, a work appropriate to the 
violent energy of realistic prose, has been a general ex- 
aggeration of the darker tints, an insistence on that promi- 
nence of what was called the "sub-fuse" colours which 



The Future of English Poetry 307 



art-critics of a century ago judged essential to sublimity 
in all art. In Continental literature, and particularly in 
the very latest Russian drama, this determination to see 
blackness and blackness only, to depict the ordinary scene 
of existence as a Valley of the Shadow of Despair, has been 
painfully frequent. In England we had a poet of con- 
siderable power, whose tragic figure crossed me in my youth, 
in whose work there is not a single gleam of hope or dignity 
for man ; — I mean the unfortunate James Thompson, author 
of The City of Dreadful Night. I cannot but believe that 
the poetry of the future, being more deeply instructed, 
will insist less emphatically upon human failure and less 
savagely upon the revolt of man. I anticipate in the 
general tone of it an earnestness, a fullness of tribute to 
the noble passion of life, an utterance simple and direct. 
I believe that it will take as its theme the magnificence of 
the spectacle of Man's successful fight with Nature, not 
the grotesque and squalid picturesqueness of his occasional 
defeat. 

It has been admirably said, in a charming essay, that 
" History may be abstract, science may be frankly in- 
human, even art may be purely formal ; but poetry 
must be full of human life." This consideration, I think, 
may make us feel perfectly secure as to the ultimate 
maintenance of poetic expression. For humanity will 
always be with us, whatever changes may be introduced 
into our social system, whatever revolutions may occur 
in religion, in legality, in public order, or in the stratifica- 
tion of composite life. I confess the only atmosphere in 
which it is impossible for me to conceive of poetry as able 
to breathe would be one of complete and humdrum uni- 
formity of existence, such as was dreamed of at one time, 
but I think is no longer so rigidly insisted on, by extreme 
socialistic reformers. As long as there is such variety of 
individual action possible as will give free scope to the 




08 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



energies and passions, the hopes and fears, of mankind, 
so long I think the element of plastic imagination will be 
found to insist on expression in the mode of formal art. 
It is quite possible that, as a result of extended knowledge 
and of the democratic instinct, a certain precipitant hard- 
ness of design, such as was presented in the nineteenth 
century by Tennyson in the blank verse lyrics in The 
Princess, by Browning in the more brilliant parts of One 
Word More, by Swinburne in his fulminating Sapphics, 
may be as little repeated as the analogous hardness of 
Dryden in MacFlecknoe or the lapidary splendour of Gray 
in his Odes. I should rather look, at least in the im- 
mediate future, for a revival of the liquid ease of Chaucer 
or the soft redundancies of The Faerie Queene. The remark- 
able experiments of the Symbolists of twenty years ago, 
and their effect upon the whole body of French verse, leads 
me to expect a continuous movement in that direction. 

It is difficult indeed to speak of the probable future of 
poetry without introducing the word Symbolism, over 
which there has raged so much windy warfare in the 
immediate past. I cannot help believing that the immense 
importance of this idea is one of the principal — perhaps the 
greatest discovery with regard to poetry which was made 
in the last generation. Symbols, among the ancient 
Greeks, were, if I mistake not, the signs by which the 
initiated worshippers of Ceres or Cybele recognised their 
mysterious unison of heart. A symbol is an indication of 
an object, in opposition to a direct description of the same ; 
it arouses the idea of it in the awakened soul; rings a 
bell, for we may almost put it so, which at once rouses the 
spirit and reminds it of some special event or imminent 
service. The importance of making this the foremost 
feature of poetry is not new, although it may be said that 
we have only lately, and only partially, become aware of 
its value. But, really, if you will consider it, all that the 



The Future of English Poetry 309 



Symbolists have been saying is involved in Bacon's phrase 
that " poetry conforms the shows of things to the desires 
of the soul, instead of subjecting the soul to external things/ ' 
There could never be presented a subject less calculated 
to be wound up with a rhetorical flourish or to close in 
pompous affirmation than that which I have so temerari- 
ously brought before you this afternoon. I hope that 
you will not think that your time has been wasted while 
we have touched, lightly and erratically, like birds on 
boughs, upon some of the probable or possible features 
of the poetry of the future. Whatever you, or I, or the 
wisest of professors, may predict on this theme of the 
unborn poets, we may be certain that there will 

" hover in their restless heads 
One thought, one grace, one wonder, at the least, 
Which into words no virtue " 

of ours can " digest." I began with the rococo image of 
a Pegasus, poised in the air, flashing and curvetting, 
petulantly refusing to alight on any expected spot. Let 
me return to it in closing, that I may suggest our only 
sage attitude to be one of always watching for his inevitable 
arrival, ready to put grateful hps to the waters of Hippocrene 
as soon as ever they bubble from the blow of his hoof. 



THE AGONY OF THE 
VICTORIAN AGE 



THE AGONY OF THE 
VICTORIAN AGE 

For a considerable time past everybody must have 
noticed, especially in private conversation, a growing 
tendency to disparagement and even ridicule of all men 
and things, and aspects of things, which can be defined as 
" Victorian." Faded habits of mind are lightly dismissed 
as typical of the Victorian Age, and old favourite poets, 
painters, and musicians are treated with the same scorn as 
the glued chairs and glass bowls of wax flowers of sixty 
years ago. The new generation are hardly willing to dis- 
tinguish what was good from what was bad in the time of 
their grandmothers. With increasing audacity they repu- 
diate the Victorian Age as a sceclum insipiens et infaceturn, 
and we meet everywhere with the exact opposite of Mon- 
taigne's " Je les approuve tous Fun apres V autre, quoi' 
qu'ils disent." Our younger contemporaries are slipping 
into the habit of approving of nothing from the moment 
that they are told it is Victorian. 

This may almost be described as an intellectual and 
moral revolution. Every such revolution means some 
liberation of the intellect from bondage, and shows itself 
first of all in a temper of irreverence ; the formulas of the 
old faith are no longer treated with respect and presently 
they are even ridiculed. It is useless to close our eyes to 
the fact that a spirit of this kind is at work amongst us, 
undermining the dignity and authority of objects and 
opinions and men that seemed half a century ago to be 

313 



314 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



more perennial than bronze. Successive orators and 
writers have put the public in possession of arguments, 
and especially have sparkled in pleasantries, which have 
sapped the very foundations of the faith of 1850. The 
infection has attacked us all, and there is probably no one 
who is not surprised, if he seriously reflects, to realise that 
he once implicitly took his ideas of art from Ruskin and 
of philosophy from Herbert Spencer. These great men 
are no longer regarded by anybody with the old credulity ; 
their theories and their dogmas are mined, as were those 
of the early eighteenth century in France by the Encyclo- 
paedists, by a select class of destructive critics, in whose 
wake the whole public irregularly follows. The ordinary 
unthinking man accepts the change with exhilaration, 
since in this country the majority have always enjoyed 
seeing noses knocked off statues. But if we are to rejoice 
in liberation from the bondage of the Victorian Age we 
ought to know what those bonds were. 

The phenomena of the decadence of an age are never 
similar to those of its rise. This is a fact which is com- 
monly overlooked by the opponents of a particular section 
of social and intellectual history. In the initial stages of 
a " period" we look for audacity, fire, freshness, passion. 
We look for men of strong character who will hew a channel 
along which the torrent of new ideals and subversive senti- 
ments can rush. But this violence cannot be expected to 
last, and it would lead to anarchy if it did. Slowly the 
impetus of the stream diminishes, the river widens, and 
its waters reach a point where there seems to be no further 
movement in their expanse. No age contains in itself the 
elements of endless progress; it starts in fury, and little 
by little the force of it declines. Its decline is patent — 
but not until long afterwards — in a deadening of effort, in 
a hardening of style. Dryden leads on to Pope, Pope 
points down to Erasmus Darwin, after whom the world 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 315 



can but reject the whole classical system. The hungry 
sheep of a new generation look up and are not fed, and 
this is the vision which seems to face us in the last adven- 
tures of the schools of yesterday. 

But what is, or was, the Victorian Age ? The world 
speaks glibly of it as though it were a province of history 
no less exactly defined than the career of a human being 
from birth to death; but in practice no one seems in a 
hurry to mark out its frontiers. Indeed, to do so is an 
intrepid act. If the attempt is to be made at all, then 
1840, the year of Queen Victoria's marriage with Prince 
Albert, may be suggested as the starting-point, and 1890 
(between the death-dates of Browning, Newman, and 
Tennyson) as the year in which the Victorian Age is seen 
sinking into the sands. Nothing could be vaguer, or more 
open to contention in detail, than this delineation, but at 
all events it gives our deliberations a frame. It excludes 
Pickwick, which is the typical picture of English life 
under William IV., and Sartor Resartus, which was the 
tossing of the bound giant in his sleep; but it includes 
the two- volume Tennyson, " chiefly lyrical/ ' the stir of 
the Corn Law agitation, the Tractarian Crisis of 1841, 
and the History of the French Revolution and Past and 
Present, when the giant opened his eyes and fought with 
his chains. Darwin was slowly putting together the notes 
he had made on the Beagle, and Hugh Miller was dis- 
turbing convention by his explorations of the Old Red 
Sandstone. Most of all, the discussion of permanent and 
transient elements in Christianity was taking a foremost 
place in all strata of society, not merely in the form of 
the contest around Tract go, but in the divergent directions 
of Colenso, the Simeon Evangelicals, and Maurice. 

The Victorian Age began in rancour and turmoil. This 
is an element which we must not overlook, although it was 
in a measure superficial. A series of storms, rattling and 



3 1 6 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



recurrent tempests of thunder and lightning, swept over 
public opinion, which had been so calm under George IV. 
and so dull under William IV. Nothing could exceed the 
discord of vituperation, the Hebraism of Carlyle denouncing 
the Vaticanism of Wiseman, " Free Kirk and other 
rubbish' 1 pitted against " Comtism, ghastliest of algebraic 
specialities." This theological tension marks the first 
twenty years and then slowly dies down, after the passion 
expended over Essays and Reviews. It was in 1840 that 
we find Macaulay, anxious to start a scheme of Whig 
reform and to cut a respectable figure as Secretary of State 
for War, unable to get to business because of the stumbling- 
block of religious controversy. Everything in heaven and 
earth was turned into " a theological treatise/ ' and all 
that people cared about was " the nature of the sacra- 
ments, the operation of holy orders, the visibility of the 
Church and baptismal regeneration/ ' The sitting member 
goes down to Edinburgh to talk to his constituents about 
Corn Laws and Sugar Duties and the Eastern Question; 
he is met by "a din " of such objections as " Yes, 
Mr. Macaulay, that is all very well for a statesman, 
but what becomes of the headship of our Lord Jesus 
Christ?" 

If the Victorian Age opened in a tempest of theology, it 
was only natural that it should cultivate a withering dis- 
dain for those who had attempted to reform society on a 
non-theological basis. In sharp contradistinction to the 
indulgence of the Georgian period for philosophic specu- 
lation, England's interest in which not even her long . 
continental wars had been able to quench, we find with 
the accession of Victoria the credit of the French thinkers 
almost abruptly falling. Voltaire, never very popular in 
England, becomes " as mischievous a monkey as any of 
them " ; the enthusiasm for Rousseau, which had reached 
extravagant proportions, completely disappears, and he is 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 317 



merely the slanderous sceptic, who, after soaking other 
people's waistcoats with his tears, sent his own babies to 
the Foundling Hospital. The influence of the French 
eighteenth-century literature on the mind of England was 
first combated and then baldly denied. The premier 
journalist of the age declared, with the satisfaction of a 
turkey-cock strutting round his yard, that no trace of 
the lowest level of what could be called popularity re- 
mained in England to the writers of France, and he felt 
himself " entitled to treat as an imbecile conceit the 
pretence' ' that a French school of thought survived in 
Great Britain. Such was the Podsnappery of the hour 
in its vigilance against moral and religious taint. 

Notwithstanding, or perhaps we ought to say inevitably 
conducted by these elements of passion and disdain, the 
infant Victorian Age passed rapidly into the great political 
whirlpool of 1846, with its violent concentration of enthu- 
siasm on the social questions which affected the welfare of 
the masses, with, in short, its tremendous upheaval of a 
practical radicalism. From that time forth its develop- 
ment baffles analysis. Whatever its present enemies may 
allege to its discredit, they cannot pretend that it was 
languid or monotonous. No Age hitherto lived out upon 
the world's surface has been so multiform or so busy; none 
defies the art of the historian to such a bewildering degree. 
Its latest critic does not exaggerate when he says that our 
fathers and our grandfathers have poured forth and accumu- 
lated so vast a quantity of information concerning it " that 
the industry of a Ranke would be submerged by it and the 
perspicacity of a Gibbon would quail before it." This is 
manifestly true, and it is evident that an encyclopaedia 
would be required to discuss all the divisions of so tre- 
mendous a subject. If we look over too wide a horizon 
we lose our bearings altogether. We get a hopelessly 
confused notion of the course of progress; we see experi- 



3 1 8 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



ments, criticisms, failures, but who is to assure us what 

was the tendency of evolution? 

Mr. Lytton Strachey's " Eminent Victorians' ' has 
arrived at the very moment when all readers are prepared 
to discuss the age he deals with, and when public opinion 
is aware of the impatience which has been " rising in the 
bosom of a man like smoke " under the pressure of the 
insistent praise of famous men. The book has attracted 
a very remarkable degree of notice; it has been talked 
about wherever people have met together; and has 
received the compliment of being seriously displayed before 
the University of Oxford by one of the most eminent of 
the Victorian statesmen whom Oxford has produced. If 
we look into the causes of this success, enjoyed by the 
earliest extended book of a writer almost unknown, a 
book, too, which pretends to no novelty of matter or 
mystery of investigation, we find them partly in the pre- 
paredness of the public mind for something in the way of 
this exposure, but partly also in the skill of the writer. 
Whatever else may be said of Mr. Lytton Strachey, no one 
can deny that he is very adroit, or that he possesses the 
art of arresting attention. 

It is part of this adroitness that he contrives to modify, 
and for a long time even to conceal the fact that his pur- 
pose is to damage and discredit the Victorian Age. He is 
so ceremonious in his approach, so careful to avoid all 
brusqueness and coarseness, that his real aim may be for 
awhile unobserved. He even professes to speak " dis- 
passionately, impartially, and without ulterior intentions/ ' 
We may admit the want of passion and perhaps the want 
of partiality, but we cannot avoid seeing the ulterior 
intention, which is to undermine and belittle the reputa- 
tion of the great figures of the Victorian Age. When the 
prodigious Signor Marinetti proposes to hurl the " leprous 
palaces " of his native city into her " fetid canals/' and to 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 319 



build in their place warehouses and railway stations, he does 
not differ in essential attitude from Mr. Lytton Strachey, 
delicately " laying bare the facts of some cases.' 1 The 
only real difference consists in the finer tact, the greater 
knowledge of history — in short, the superior equipment of 
the English iconoclast. Each of them — and all the troop 
of opponents who grumble and mutter between their 
extremes — each of them is roused by an intense desire to 
throw off the shackles of a dying age, in which they have 
taught themselves chiefly to see affectation, pomposity, 
a virtuosity more technical than emotional, and an exasper- 
ating monotony of effect. 

Mr. Strachey has conducted his attack from the point of 
view of biography. He realises the hopelessness of writing 
a history of the Victorian Age; it can only be dealt with 
in detail; it must be nibbled into here and there; dis- 
credited piecemeal; subjected to the ravages of the white 
ant. He has seen that the lives of the great Victorians 
lend themselves to this insidious kind of examination, 
because what was worst in the pretentiousness of their age 
is to be found enshrined in the Standard Biographies (in 
two volumes, post octavo) under which most of them are 
buried. Mr. Strachey has some criticism of these monsters 
which could hardly be bettered : 

" Those two fat volumes, with which it is our custom to 
commemorate the dead — who does not know them, with 
their ill-digested masses of material, their slipshod style, 
their tone of tedious panegyric, their lamentable lack of 
selection, of detachment, of design ? They are as familiar 
as the cortege of the undertaker, and bear the same air 
of slow, funereal barbarism/ ' 



It is impossible not to agree with this pungent criticism. 
Every candid reader could point to a dozen Victorian 



320 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



biographies which deserve Mr. Strachey's condemnation. 
For instance, instead of taking up any of the specimens 
which he has chosen for illustration, we need only refer the 
reader's memory to the appendix of " Impressions/' by a 
series of elderly friends, which closes the official Life of 
Tennyson, published in 1897. He will find there an ex- 
pression of the purest Victorian optimism. The great 
object being to foist on the public a false and superhuman 
picture of the deceased, a set of illustrious contemporaries 
— who themselves expected to be, when they died, trans- 
figured in like manner — form a bodyguard around the 
corpse of the poet and emit their " tedious panegyric.' ' 
In this case, more even than in any of the instances which 
Mr. Strachey has taken, the contrast between the real 
man and the funereal image is positively grotesque. 

Without question this contrast is not a little responsible 
for the discredit into which the name of Tennyson has 
fallen. Lord Selborne found nothing in Tennyson " incon- 
sistent with the finest courtesy and the gentlest heart." 
Dr. Jowett had preserved through forty years " an ever- 
increasing wonder at the depth of his thought," and 
emphatically stated that he " was above such feelings as a 
desire of praise, or fear of blame." (Tennyson, who was 
thirsty for ceaseless laudation, and to whom a hint of 
censure was like the bite of a mosquito !) Frederick 
Myers ejaculated, " How august, how limitless a thing 
was Tennyson's own spirit's upward flight ! " The Duke 
of Argyll, again, during the space of forty years, had 
found him " always reverent, hating all levity or flip- 
pancy," and was struck by his possessing " the noblest 
humility I have ever known." Lord Macaulay, who 
" had stood absolutely aloof," once having been permitted 
to glance at the proof-sheets of Guenevere, was "abso- 
lutely subdued " to " unfeigned and reverent admiration." 
The duke was the glad emissary who was " the medium 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 321 



of introduction/' and he recognised in Macaulay's sub- 
jugation "a premonition " of Tennyson's complete 
" conquest over the living world and over the generations 
that are to come." 

Thus the priesthood circled round their idol, waving 
their censers and shouting their hymns of praise, while 
their ample draperies effectively hid from the public eye 
the object which was really in the centre of their throng, 
namely, a gaunt, black, touzled man, rough in speech, 
brooding like an old gipsy over his inch of clay pipe stuffed 
with shag, and sucking in port wine with gusto — " so long 
as it is black and sweet and strong, I care not ! - ' Their 
fault lay, not in their praise, which was much of it deserved, 
but in their deliberate attempt in the interests of what 
was Nice and Proper — gods of the Victorian Age — to 
conceal what any conventional person might think not 
quite becoming. There were to be no shadows in the 
picture, no stains or rugosities on the smooth bust of rosy 
wax. 

On the pretext, therefore, of supplying a brief and above 
all a complimentary set of portraits, Mr. Strachey takes 
the biography of an ecclesiastic, an educational authority, 
a woman of action, and a man of adventure, and tells them 
over again in his own way. The four figures he chooses 
are all contemporary, and yet, so implacably does time 
hurry us along, all would be very old if they still survived. 
Three of them could hardly survive, for Cardinal Manning 
and Dr. Arnold would be far over a hundred, and Florence 
Nightingale in her ninety-ninth year; the fourth, General 
Gordon, would be eighty-five. The motto of Mr. 
Strachey is " Put not your trust in the intellectual princes 
of the Victorian Age," or, at least, in what their biographers 
have reported of them; they were not demi-gods in any 
sense, but eccentric and forceful figures working dimly 
towards aims which they only understood in measure 

Y 



322 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



and which very often were not worth the energy which 
they expended on them. This attitude alone would be 
enough to distinguish Mr. Strachey from the purveyors of 
indiscriminate praise, and in adopting it he emphasises his 
deliberate break with the age of which they were the envy 
and the ornament. Given his 1918 frame of mind, no 
blame can attach to him for adopting this gesture. At 
moments when the tradition of a people has been violently 
challenged there have always ensued these abrupt acts of 
what to the old school seems injustice. If Mr. Lytton 
Strachey is reproached with lack of respect, he might 
reply : In the midst of a revolution, who is called on to 
be respectful to the fallen monarch ? Extreme admiration 
for this or that particular leader, the principle of Victorian 
hero-worship, is the very heresy, he might say, which I 
have set out to refute. 

When St. John the Divine addressed his Apocalypse to 
the Angels of the Seven Churches, he invented a system of 
criticism which is worthy of all acceptation. He dwelt 
first upon the merits of each individual church; not till 
he had exhausted them did he present the reverse of the 
coin. In the same spirit, critics who, in the apostle's 
phrase, have "something against " Mr. Lytton Strachey, 
will do well to begin by acknowledging what is in his favour. 
In the first place, he writes sensibly, rapidly, and lucidly, 
without false ornament of any kind. Some of his pages 
might, with advantage, be pinned up opposite the writing- 
tables of our current authors of detestable pseudo- 
Meredithian and decayed Paterese. His narrative style 
is concise and brisk. His book may undoubtedly best be 
compared among English classics with Whiggism in its 
Relations to Literature, although it is less discursive and 
does not possess the personal element of that vivacious 
piece of polemic. In this recurrence of Mr. Strachey to a 
pellucid stream of prose we see an argument against his 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 323 



own theory of revolt. The procedure of the arts, the 
mechanical tricks of the trade, do they really improve or 
decline from age to age ? Are they not, in fact, much more 
the result of individual taste than of fashion? There 
seems to be no radical change in the methods of style. 
The extravagant romanticism of rebellion against the 
leaders of the Victorian Age finds at length an exponent, 
and behold he writes as soberly as Lord Morley, or as 
Newman himself ! 

The longest of these biographies is that of Cardinal 
Manning, and it is the one with which Mr. Lytton Strachey 
has taken most pains. Briefer than the briefest of the 
English Men of Letters series of biographies, it is yet 
conducted with so artful an economy as to give the im- 
pression, to an uninstructed reader, that nothing essential 
about the career of Manning has been omitted. To produce 
this impression gifts of a very unusual order were required, 
since the writer, pressed on all sides by a plethora of in- 
formation, instead of being incommoded by it, had to 
seem to be moving smoothly in an atmosphere of his own 
choosing, and to be completely unembarrassed by his 
material. He must have the air of saying, in Froude's 
famous impertinence, " This is all we know, and more 
than all, yet nothing to what the angels know." In the 
face of a whole literature of controversy and correspondence, 
after a storm of Purcell and Hutton, Ward and Mozley 
and Liddon tearing at one another's throats, Mr. Lytton 
Strachey steps delicately on to the stage and says, in a 
low voice, " Come here and I will tell you all about a 
funny ecclesiastic who had a Hat, and whose name was 
Henry Edward Manning. It will not take us long, and 
ever afterwards, if you hear that name mentioned, you 
will know everything about him which you need to remem- 
ber." It is audacious, and to many people will seem 
shocking, but it is very cleverly done. 



324 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



The study of Florence Nightingale is an even better 
example of Mr. Strachey' s method, since she is the one of 
his four subjects for whom he betrays some partiality. 
" The Miss Nightingale of fact was not as facile fancy 
painted her," and it has greatly entertained Mr. Strachey 
to chip the Victorian varnish off and reveal the iron will 
beneath. His first chapter puts it in one of his effective 
endings : — 

" Her mother was still not quite resigned ; surely Florence 
might at least spend the summer in the country. At this, 
indeed, among her intimates, Mrs. Nightingale almost 
wept. ' We are ducks/ she said with tears in her eyes, 
' who have hatched a wild swan.' But the poor lady was 
wrong; it was not a swan that they had hatched, it was 
an eagle/ 1 

It is therefore as an eagle, black, rapacious, with hooked 
bill and crooked talons, that he paints Miss Nightingale; 
and the Swan of Scutari, the delicate Lady with the Lamp, 
fades into a fable. Mr. Strachey glorifies the demon that 
possessed this pitiless, rushing spirit of philanthropy. He 
gloats over its ravages, its irresistible violence of purpose. 
It is an evident pleasure to him to be able to detach so 
wild a figure from the tameness of the circumambient 
scene, and all his enmity to the period comes out in the 
closing pages, in which he describes how the fierce philan- 
thropist lived so long that the Victorian Age had its 
revenge upon her, and reduced her, a smiling, fat old 
woman, to " compliance and complacency/ ' It is a 
picture which will give much offence, but it is certainly 
extremely striking, and Mr. Strachey can hardly be accused 
of having done more than deepen the shadows which 
previous biographers had almost entirely omitted. 

In this study, if the author is unusually indulgent to his 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 325 



subject, he is relatively severer than usual to the surrounding 
figures. To some of them, notably to Arthur Hugh Clough, 
he seems to be intolerably unjust. On the other hand, to 
most of those public men who resisted the work of Florence 
Nightingale it is difficult to show mercy. Mr. Strachey is 
so contemptuous, almost so vindictive, in his attitude to 
Lord Panmure, that the reader is tempted to take up the 
cudgels in defence of an official so rudely flouted. But, 
on reflection, what is there that can be said in palliation 
of Lord Panmure ? He was the son of a man of whom his 
own biographer has admitted that "he preserved late into 
the [nineteenth] century the habits and passions — scandal- 
ous and unconcealed— which had, except in his case, passed 
away. He was devoted to his friends so long as they 
remained complaisant, and violent and implacable to all 
who thwarted him. His uncontrollable temper alienated 
him from nearly all his family in his latter years. In 
private life he was an immovable despot," 

This was the father of Fox Maule, second Baron Panmure, 
of whom Mr. Strachey has so much to say. Evidently he 
was a Regency type, as the son was a Victorian. Deter- 
mined not to resemble his father, Fox Maule early became 
a settled and industrious M.P., and in 1846 Lord John 
Russell made him Secretary of War. He held the same 
post under Lord Palmerston from 1855 to 1858. Nothing 
could dislodge him from office; not even the famous 
despatch " Take care of Dawb " could stir him. In i860 
he became eleventh Earl of Dalhousie. He died two years 
later, having enjoyed every distinction, even that of Presi- 
dent of the Royal Military Asylum. He was " unco guid," 
as pious as his father had been profane, but he had no 
social or political or intellectual merit of any kind which 
can at this distance of time be discerned. Florence Night- 
ingale called him the Bison, and his life's energy seems to 
have been expended in trying, often with success, to 



326 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



frustrate every single practical reform which she suggested. 
To the objection that Mr. Strachey has depicted the heroine 
as "an ill-tempered, importunate spinster, who drove a 
statesman to his death," he might conceivably reply that 
if history, grown calm with the passage of years, does so 
reveal her, it is rather absurd to go on idealising her. Why 
not study the real Eagle in place of the fabulous Swan? 
It is difficult to condemn Mr. Strachey along this line of 
argument. 

The early Victorians liked what was definable and 
tangible; they were "ponderous mechanists of style." 
Even in their suggestions of change they preserved an 
impenetrable decorum of demeanour, a studied progress, 
a deep consciousness of the guiding restraint of tradition 
upon character. Their preoccupation with moral ideas 
tinged the whole of their surroundings, their literature, 
their art, their outlook upon life. That the works of 
Mr. Charles Dickens, so excruciatingly funny, should have 
been produced and appreciated in the midst of this intense 
epoch of exhortation seems a paradox, till we recollect 
how careful Dickens is, when his laughter is loudest, never 
to tamper with " the deep sense of moral evil." This 
apprehension of the rising immorality of the world, against 
which the only rampart was the education of "a thorough 
English gentleman, Christian, manly and enlightened," 
was dominant in no spirit more than in that of Dr. 
Thomas Arnold, of whom Mr. Strachey gives a somewhat 
deterrent portrait. It is deterrent, because we have 
passed, in three-quarters of a century, completely out of 
the atmosphere in which Dr. Arnold moved and breathed. 
We are not sure that Mr. Strachey acted very wisely in 
selecting Dr. Arnold for one of his four subjects, since the 
great schoolmaster was hardly a Victorian at all. When 
he entered the Church George III. was on the throne ; his 
accomplishment at Rugby was started under George IV. 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 327 



he died when the Victorian Age was just beginning. He 
was a forerunner, but hardly a contemporary. 

Although in his attitude to the great Rugby schoolmaster 
Mr. Strachey shows more approbation than usual, this 
portrait has not given universal satisfaction. It has rather 
surprisingly called forth an indignant protest from Dr. 
Arnold's granddaughter. Yet such is the perversity of the 
human mind that the mode in which Mrs, Humphry Ward 
" perstringes ,> the biographer brings us round to that 
biographer's side. For Mrs. Ward has positively the in- 
discretion, astounding in a writer of her learning and experi- 
ence, to demand the exclusion of irony from the legitimate 
weapons of the literary combatant. This is to stoop to 
sharing one of the meanest prejudices of the English common- 
place mind, which has always resented the use of that 
delicate and pointed weapon. Moreover, Mrs. Ward does 
nbt merely adopt the plebeian attitude, but she delivers her- 
self bound hand and foot to the enemy by declaring the use 
of irony to be " unintelligent.' ' In support of this amazing 
statement she quotes some wandering phrase of Sainte- 
Beuve. By the light of recent revelations, whether Sainte- 
Beuve was ironical or not, he was certainly perfidious. But, 
to waive that matter, does Mrs. Humphry Ward consider 
that Swift and Lucian and Machiavelli were, as she puts it, 
" doomed to failure " because they used irony as a weapon ? 
Was Heine and is Anatole France conspicuous for want of 
intelligence? And, after all, ought not Mrs. Ward to 
remember that if she had a very serious grandfather, she had 
a still more celebrated uncle, who wrote Friendship's 
Garland ? 

While no one else will seriously blame Mr. Strachey for 
employing irony in his investigation of character, the subject 
leads on to what may be regarded as a definite fault in his 
method. A biographer should be sympathetic ; not blind, 
not indulgent, but sympathetic. He should be able to enter 



328 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



into the feelings of his subjects, and be anxious to do so. It 
is in sympathy, in imaginative insight, that Mr. Strachey 
fails. His personages are like puppets observed from a great 
height by an amiable but entirely superior intelligence. 
The peculiar aim of Mr. Strachey, his desire to lower our 
general conception of the Victorian Age, tempts him to 
exaggerate this tendency, and he succumbs to the tempta- 
tion. His description of Lord Acton at Rome in 1870 — " he 
despised Lord Acton almost as much as he disliked him " — is 
not ironic, it is contemptuous. Arthur Hugh Clough 
presents no aspect to Mr. Strachey but that of a timid and 
blundering packer-up of parcels; one might conceive that 
the biographer had never contemplated the poet in any 
other capacity than, with sealing-wax in his hand and string 
between his lips, shuddering under the eye of Miss Nightin- 
gale. The occasional references to Lord Wolseley suggest an 
unaccountable hurrying figure of pygmy size, which Mr. 
Strachey can only just discern. This attitude of hovering 
superiority is annoying. 

But it reaches a more dangerous importance when it 
affects spiritual matters. The author interests himself, 
from his great height, in the movements of his Victorian 
dwarfs, and notices that they are particularly active, and 
prone to unusual oddity of movement, when they are in- 
spired by religious and moral passion. Their motions 
attract his attention, and he describes them with gusto and 
often with wit. His sketch of Rome before the (Ecumenical 
Council is an admirably studied page. Miss Nightingale's 
ferocity when the War Office phalanx closed its ranks is 
depicted in the highest of spirits ; it is impossible not to be 
riveted by the scene round Cardinal Manning's death-bed; 
but what did those manifestations mean ? To Mr. Strachey 
it is evident that the fun of the whole thing is that they 
meant nothing at all ; they were only part of the Victorian 
absurdity. It is obvious that religious enthusiasm, as a 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 329 



personal matter, means nothing to him. He investigates 
the feelings of Newman or Keble as a naturalist plight the 
contortions of an insect. The ceremonies and rites of the 
Church are objects of subdued hilarity to him, and in their 
presence, if he suppresses his laughter, it is solely to prevent 
his missing any detail precious to his curiosity. When the 
subject of Baptismal Regeneration agitates the whole pious 
world of England Mr. Strachey seems to say, looking down 
with exhilaration on the anthill beneath him, " The questions 
at issue are being taken very seriously by a large number 
of persons. How Early Victorian of them ! " Mr. Strachey 
has yet to learn that questions of this kind are " taken seri- 
ously " by serious people, and that their emotion is both 
genuine and deep. He sees nothing but alcoholic eccen- 
tricity in the mysticism of Gordon. His cynicism sometimes 
carries him beyond the confines of good taste, as in the pas- 
sage where he refers to the large and dirty ears of the Roman 
cardinals. Still worse is the query as to what became of the 
soul of Pope Pius IX. after his death. 

These are errors in discretion. A fault in art is the want of 
care which the author takes in delineating his minor or sub- 
ordinate figures. He gives remarkable pains, for example, 
to his study of General Gordon, but he is indifferent to 
accuracy in his sketches of the persons who came into con- 
tact, and often into collision, with Gordon. In this he 
resembles those French painters, such as Bastien Lepage, 
who focus their eye on one portion of their canvas, and work 
that up to a high perfection, while leaving the rest of the 
picture misty and vague. Even in that case the subordinate 
figures, if subdued in fogginess, should not be falsely drawn, 
but Mr. Strachey, intent upon the violent portrait of Gordon, 
is willing to leave his Baring and Hartington and Wolseley 
inexact as well as shadowy. The essay on General Gordon, 
indeed, is the least successful of the four monographs. 
Dexterous as he is, Mr. Strachey^has not had the material 



330 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



to work upon which now exists to elucidate his other and 
earlier subjects. But it is difficult to account for his 
apparently not having read Mr. Bernard Holland's life of 
the Duke of Devonshire, which throws much light, evidently 
unknown to Mr. Strachey, on the Gordon relief expedition. 
He ought to know that Sir Evelyn Baring urged the 
expedition, while Chamberlain was one of its opponents. 
Mr. Strachey does not seem to have noticed how much the 
issue was confused by conflicting opinions as to whether 
the route to be taken should be by Suakin or up the Nile. 

No part of his book is more vigorous or picturesque than 
the chapter dealing with the proclamation of Papal Infalli- 
bility. But here again one is annoyed by the glibness with 
which Mr. Strachey smoothly asserts what are only his 
conjectures. 

In his account of Manning's reception in Rome — and 
this is of central importance in his picture of Manning's 
whole career — he exaggerates the personal policy of Pio 
Nono, whom he represents as more independent of the staff 
of the Curia than was possible. Rome has never acknow- 
ledged the right of the individual, even though that indi- 
vidual be the Pope, to an independent authority. Mr. Odo 
Russell was resident secretary in Rome from 1858 to 1870, 
and his period of office was drawing to a close when Manning 
arrived; he was shortly afterwards removed to become 
Assistant Under Secretary of State at our Foreign Office. 
The author of Eminent Victorians is pleased to describe 
" poor Mr. Russell " as little better than a fly buzzing in 
Manning' s " spider' s web of delicate and clinging diplomacy." 
It is not in the memory of those who were behind the scenes 
that Odo Russell was such a cipher. Though suave in 
address, he was by no means deficient in decision or force of 
character, as was evidenced when, some months later, he 
explained to Mr. Gladstone his reasons for stating to Bis- 
marck, without instructions from the government, that the 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 331 



Black Sea question was one on which Great Britain might be 
compelled to go to war with or without allies. Lord Morley ' s 
Life of Gladstone (vol. ii., p. 354) is explicit on this interest- 
ing point. The information which, by special permission 
of the Pope, Cardinal Manning was able to give to him 
on all that was going on in the Council was, of course, 
of great value to Odo Russell, but his views on other 
aspects of the question were derived from quite different 
sources. 

In this respect he had the advantage of the Cardinal, both 
on account of his diplomatic position and of his long and 
intimate knowledge both of Vatican policy and of the forces 
which the Curia has at its command. On the strength of 
those forces, and on the small amount of effective support 
which British opposition to the Decree of Infallibility was 
likely to receive from the Catholic Powers, he no doubt held 
strong opinions. Some years later he did not conceal his 
conviction that Prince Bismarck would be worsted in his 
conflict with Rome on the Education Laws, and the event 
proved his forecast to be perfectly correct. This is an ex- 
ample of the dangers which beset a too glib and superficial 
treatment of political events which were conducted in secret, 
and with every circumstance of mystery. 

Several of the characteristics which diversify Mr. 
Strachey's remarkable volume are exemplified in the follow- 
ing quotation. It deals with the funeral of Cardinal 
Manning : — 

" The route of the procession was lined by vast crowds of 
working people, whose imaginations, in some instinctive 
manner, had been touched. Many who had hardly seen him 
declared that in Cardinal Manning they had lost their best 
friend. Was it the magnetic vigour of the dead man's spirit 
that moved them ? Or was it his valiant disregard of com- 
mon custom and those conventional reserves and poor 



332 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



punctilios, which are wont to hem about the great? Or 
was it something untameable in his glances and in his ges- 
tures ? Or was it, perhaps, the mysterious glamour linger- 
ing about him of the antique organisation of Rome ? For 
whatever cause, the mind of the people had been impressed ; 
and yet, after all, the impression was more acute than last- 
ing. The Cardinal's memory is a dim thing to-day. And 
he who descends into the crypt of that Cathedral which 
Manning never lived to see, will observe, in the quiet niche 
with the sepulchral monument, that the dust lies thick on 
the strange, the incongruous, the almost impossible object 
which, with its elaborations of dependent tassels, hangs 
down from the dim vault like some forlorn and forgotten 
trophy, the Hat." 

Longinus tells us that " a just judgment of style is the 
final fruit of long experience." In the measured utterances 
of Mr. Asquith we recognise the speech of a man to whom all 
that is old and good is familiar, and in whom the art of 
finished expression has become a habit. No more elegantly 
balanced, no more delicately perceptive mind than his has 
appeared of recent times in our midst, and there is some- 
thing in the equipoise of his own genius which points Mr. 
Asquith out as a judge peculiarly well fitted to sit in judg- 
ment upon rival ages. In his Romanes lecture there was 
but one thing to be regretted : the restricted space which it 
offered for the full expansion of the theme. Mr. Asquith 
excels in swift and rapid flights, but even for him the 
Victorian Age is too broad a province to be explored within 
one hour. He endeavoured to lighten his task by ex- 
cluding theology and politics, and indeed but for such self- 
denial he could scarcely have moved at all in so dense an air. 
He was able, however, having thrown out so much formidable 
ballast, to rise above his subject, and gazing at the Victorian 
Age, as it recedes, he declared it to have been very good. 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 333 



The young men who despise and attack that Age receive 
no support in any particular from Mr. Asquith. 

He dwells on the fecundity of the literature of the Vic- 
torian Age in its middle period, and especially on the publi- 
cations which adorned the decade from 1850 to 1859. He 
calls those years, very justly, " marvellous and almost 
unexampled' ' in their rich profusion. I may suggest that 
the only rival to them in our history is the period from 
1590 to 1600, which saw the early plays of Shakespeare, 
the Faerie Qveene, the Arcadia, the Ecclesiastical Polity, 
Tamburlaine, The Discovery of Guiana, and Bacon's Essays . 
If the works catalogued by Mr. Asquith do not equal these 
in intensity, they excel them by the breadth of the ground 
they cover, extending from Browning to Darwin and from 
Thackeray to Ruskin. Moreover, the Oxford list might 
have included Lavengro and Newman's Lectures, and 
Herbert Spencer's Social Statics. The only third decade 
worthy to be named with those of 1590 and 1850 is that 
which opens in 1705, and is illuminated by the names of 
Pope, Shaftesbury, Swift, Arbuthnot, Defoe, Steele, Addison, 
and Berkeley. It is pleasant to compare these three magni- 
ficently flowering epochs, but not profitable if we attempt 
to weigh one against the other. They are comparable only 
in the splendour of their accomplishment. 

It is more difficult to fit science into our scheme of the 
Victorian Age than to find places there for Art and Litera- 
ture. Perhaps the reason of this is that the latter were 
national in their character, whereas scientific inquiry, 
throughout the nineteenth century, was carried on upon 
international lines, or, at least, in a spirit unprecedentedly 
non-provincial. The vast achievements of science, practical 
and theoretical, were produced for the world, not for a race. 
Mr. Asquith speaks with justice and eloquence of the appear- 
ance of Darwin's Origin of Species which he distinguishes 
as being " if not actually the most important, certainly the 



334 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



most interesting event of the Age," and his remarks on the 
fortune of that book are excellent. No one can over-estimate 
the value of what we owe to Darwin. But perhaps a French- 
man might speak in almost the same terms of Claude 
Bernard, whose life and work ran parallel with Darwin's. 
If the Origin of Species made an epoch in 1859, the Intro- 
duction a la medicine experimentale made another in 1865. 
Both these books, as channels by which the experimental 
labours of each investigator reached the prepared and 
instructed public, exercised at once, and have continued 
ever since to exercise, an enormous effect on thought as 
well as on knowledge. They transformed the methods by 
which man approaches scientific investigation, and while 
they instructed they stimulated a new ardour for instruction. 
In each case the value of the discovery lay in the value of 
the idea which led to the discovery, and, as some one has 
said in the case of Claude Bernard, they combined for the 
first time the operations of science and philosophy. The 
parallel between these two contemporaries extends, in a 
measure, to their disciples and successors, and seems to 
suggest that Mr. Asquith in his generous and difficult 
estimate may have exaggerated the purely Victorian element 
in the science of the age of Darwin. This only accentuates 
the difficulty, and he may perhaps retort that there is an 
extreme danger in suggesting what does and what does not 
form a part of so huge a system. 

Justifiably Mr. Asquith takes it for granted that the 
performance of the central years of the Victorian Age was 
splendid. With those who deny merit to the writers and 
artists of the last half century it is difficult to reach a com- 
mon ground for argument. What is to be the criterion of 
taste if all the multiform exhibitions of it which passed 
muster from 1840 to 1890 are now to be swept away with 
contumely ? Perhaps indeed it is only among those extrava- 
gant romanticists who are trying to raise entirely new ideals, 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 335 



unrelated to any existing forms of art and literature, that 
we find a denial of all merit to the Victorian masters. 
Against this caricature of criticism, this Bolshevism, it 
would be hopeless to contend. But there is a large and 
growing class of more moderate thinkers who hold, in the 
first place, that the merit of the leading Victorian writers 
has been persistently over-estimated, and that since its 
culmination the Victorian spirit has not ceased to decay, 
arriving at length at the state of timidity and repetition 
which encourages what is ugly, narrow, and vulgar, and 
demands nothing better than a swift dismissal to the 
dust-bin. 

Every stratum of society, particularly if it is at all sophis- 
ticated, contains a body of barbarians who are usually 
silent from lack of occasion to express themselves, but who 
are always ready to seize an opportunity to suppress a move- 
ment of idealism. We accustom ourselves to the idea that 
certain broad principles of taste are universally accepted, 
and our respectable newspapers foster this benevolent 
delusion by talking habitually " over the heads," as we say, 
of the majority of their readers. They make " great music 
for a little clan," and nothing can be more praiseworthy than 
their effort, but, as a matter of fact, with or without the aid 
of the newspapers, the people who really care for literature 
or art, or for strenuous mental exercise of any kind, are 
relatively few. If we could procure a completely confiden- 
tial statement of the number of persons to whom the names 
of Charles Lamb and Gainsborough have a distinct meaning, 
and still more of those who can summon up an impression 
of the essays of the one and of the pictures of the other, we 
should in all probability be painfully startled. Yet since 
these names enjoy what we call a universal celebrity, what 
must be the popular relation to figures much less prominent ? 

The result of this tyranny of fame, for so it must appear 
to all those who are inconvenienced by the expression of it, 



336 Some Diversions of a Man of Letters 



is to rouse a sullen tendency to attack the figures of art and 
literature whenever there arrives a chance of doing that 
successfully. Popular audiences can always be depended 
upon to cheer the statement of " a plain man " that he is not 
" clever " enough to understand Browning or Meredith. An 
assurance that life is too short to be troubled with Henry 
James wakes the lower middle class to ecstasy. An oppor- 
tunity for such protests is provided by our English lack of 
critical tradition, by our accepted habit of saying, " I do 
hate" or " I must say I rather like" this or that without 
reference to any species of authority. This seems to have 
grown with dangerous rapidity of late years. It was not 
tolerated among the Victorians, who carried admiration to 
the highest pitch. They marshalled it, they defined it, 
they turned it from a virtue into a religion, and called it 
Hero Worship. Even their abuse was a kind of admiration 
turned inside out, as in Swinburne's diatribes against Car- 
lyle, who himself fought against the theory of Darwin, not 
philosophically, but as though it were a personal insult to 
himself. Such violence of taste is now gone out of fashion ; 
every scribbler and dauber likes to believe himself on a level 
with the best, and the positive criterion of value which 
sincere admiration gave is lost to us. Hence the success of 
Mr. Lytton Strachey. 

But the decline of ardour does not explain the whole 
position, which we have to face with firmness. Epochs come 
to an end, and before they have their place finally awarded 
to them in history they are bound to endure much vicissitude 
of fortune. No amount of sarcasm or of indignant protest 
will avail to conceal the fact that we stand to-day at the 
porch, that much more probably we have already penetrated 
far into the vestibule, of a new age. What its character 
will be, or what its principal products, it is absolutely im- 
possible for us as yet to conjecture. Meanwhile the 
Victorian Age recedes, and it loses size and lustre as we get 



The Agony of the Victorian Age 337 



further and further away from it. When what was called 
" Symbolism " began to act in urgent and direct reaction 
to the aims of those still in authority, the old order received 
its notice to quit, but that was at least five and twenty years 
ago, and the change is not complete. Ages so multiform 
and redundant and full of blood as the Victorian take a long 
time to die ; they have their surprising recoveries and their 
uncovenanted convalescences. But even they give up the 
ghost at length, and are buried hastily with scant reverence. 
The time has doubtless come when aged mourners must 
prepare themselves to attend the obsequies of the Victorian 
Age with as much decency as they can muster. 

1918. 



z 



Abbaye de Creteil, 303-4 
Acton, Lord, 328 
Addison, J., relation of, to 
Romanticists, 70-1 ; 68, 76, 

82 

Agnes de Castro, by Catharine 

Trotter, 43-5 
Akenside, 74 
Allard-Meeus, J., 273 
Alroy, by B. Disraeli, 161 
American criticism, ' and Edgar 

Allan Poe, 104, 105 
Anne, Queen, 58 
Annabel Lee, by E. A. Poe, 103, 

112 

Argyll, Duke of, 320 
Ariosto, 84, 85 
Arnauld, Angelique, 39 
Arnold, M., 3, 68, 71, 133, 267 
Arnold, Dr. T., Mr. Strachey's 

portrait of, 326-7 
Asquith, Mr., Romanes lecture 

of > 332-5 

Bacon, 17 

Bagehot, W., 96 

Balfour, A. J., re standards of 

taste, 4, 5, 10 
Ballenden, Sarah, 40 
Baring, M., poems of, 265, 273-5 
Barrie, Sir J., 100 
Barry, Mrs., 57 

Batsford, Lord Redesdale at, 

217-8, 222, 224-8, 229 
Baudelaire, 106 
Bayle, 59 
Behn, Aphra, 39 
Bell, T., of Selborne, 182 
Berkeley, 98 
Betterton, 48, 57 
Birch, Rev. Dr., 61 
Blake, W., 5, 90 
Blessington, Lady, 131 
Boileau, 70, 77, 82 
Booth, 57 
Bottomley, G., 262 



33B 



Bridges, R., War poetry of, 26 
no 

de Brillac, Mile., 44 

Bronte, Charlotte, dislike of 
Dewsbury, 142-3 ; message of, 
arose from pain and resistance, 
144; her unhappiness, its 
causes, 145-6; defiance the 
note of her writings, 146-50 

Bronte, Emily, 149 

Brontes, The Challenge of the, 
address delivered on, 141-50; 
their connexion with Dews- 
bury, 1 4 1-2 

Brooke, Rupert, poems 0^268-70 

Browning, R., 9, 81, 132 

Brunetiere, 7 

Bruxambille, 95 

Bryant, 107, 108 

Bulwer-Lytton, E., ambiguity 
of his position in literature, 
117; R. Lytton's biography, 
118, 121; Lord Lytton's 
biography, 117, n 8-9, 120, 
122, 129, 130, 131, 133, 137; 
autobiography, 119-20; story 
of matrimonial troubles, 121— 
9; character, 129-30; ac- 
quaintances and friends, 130- 
2 ; relations with contem- 
porary writers and poets, 
132-4; stormy life, 134; un- 
favourable attitude of critics 
towards, 134-5; popularity 
of his writings, 135-6; ver- 
satility and merits, 136-7; 178 

Bulwer-Lytton, Mrs., opposition 
to . Bulwer-Lytton 's marriage, 
124-7 

Burghclere, Lady, open letter 
to, on Lady D. Nevill, 181-96 

Burnet, George, 52, 53, 54, 55, 
58, 59, 60 

Burnet, Gilbert, Bishop, patron 
of the Trotters, 41, 52, 53 

Burnet, Mrs., 52, 53 



Index 



339 



Burney, Dr., 33 
Burton, 96 

Byron, 76, 104, 108, 148, 161-2 
Carlyle, 100 

Carlyle, Mrs., her opinion of 

Keats, 9 
Catullus, 84 
Charles II, 40, 41 
Chateaubriand, 74 
Chatterton, 87 
Cibber, Colley, 44 
Classic poetry, Romanticists' 

revolt against principles of, 

70-90 

Clough, A. H., 325, 328 
Cockburn, Mr., 60, 61 
Coleridge, 104, 108, 274 
Collier, Jeremy, attack on stage 

immorality, 47 
Collins, 86, 110 

Colonisation, England's debt to 

Walter Raleigh, 24-5 
Congreve, Catherine Trotter's 

relations with, 43, 47, 48, 50; 

57. 58 

Coningsby, by B. Disraeli, 153, 
164, 165-6, 169, 170-2, 173 

Contarini Fleming, by B. Dis- 
raeli, 159-61, 162 

Corbett, N. M. F., poems of, 275 

Cowes in war time, 219-21 

Cowley, 82 

Cowper, 253 

Crabbe, G., Hardy compared 
with, 248 

Cranch, C. P., 105 

Cromer, Lord, essay on, 196- 
216; intellectual and literary 
activity, 197-8; as a speaker, 
198-200; interest in House 
of Lords Library, 200 ; classical 
tastes, 200-203 ; conversation, 
attitude to life and letters, 
204-8; . correspondence and 
reflections, 208-10 ; humour, 
210-12 ; verse, 212-15 i literary 
activities, 215-16 

Dacier, Mme., 52 

Dacre, by Countess of Morley, 



Dante, 225-6 

Dartmouth, George, Earl of, 
40, 42 

D'Aubigne, 78 

Daudet, A., 252 

Daudet, E., 229-30 

Davies, W. H., 262 

De Vere, Mrs., 59 

Devey, Miss, " Life of Rosina, 
Lady Lytton," by, 121 

Dewsbury, the Brontes' con- 
nexion with, 1 4 1-2 

Dickens, C, 100, 128, 131 

Disraeli, B., novels of, address, 
153-78; not taken seriously 
as an author, 153-4; three 
periods of writing, 154-5; 
contemporary fiction, 155-6; 
Vivian Grey, 156-9; The 
Young Duke, 157; Henrietta 
Temple, 159; Contarini Flem- 
ing, 159-60; Byron's influence 
on, 161 ; Voltaire's influence 
on, 162 ; fascinated by Venice, 
163; Venetia, 163; Parlia- 
mentary experience and liter- 
ary results, 164; Coningsby, 
165-6; Sybil, 167-8; Tancred, 
169-72; Prime Minister, 172; 
Lothair, 173-8; 131, 135 

Donne, J., 78, 111, 236, 244, 252 

Dorset, Charles, Earl of, 43 

Dowden, 34 

Doyle, Sir A. C, 103 

Dryden, 34, 49, 50, 70, 82, 274 

Du Bos, Abbe, 90 

Durham, Lord, 131 

Dyer, 70 

Elizabeth, Queen, sympathy 
between Raleigh and, 18-18 

Eloisa to Abelard, by Pope, its 
appeal to Romanticists, 83-4 

Emerson, 107 

Eminent Victorians, by Lytton 
Strachey, review of, 318-32 

English Poetry, The Future of, 
289-309; instances of national 
lapses in poetic output, 290; 
necessity of novelty of expres- 
sion and difficulties arising, 
291-2; advantages of ver- 



34° 



Index 



nacular poetry, 293; future 
poetry bound to dispense 
with obvious description and 
reflection and to take on 
greater subtlety of expression, 
294-7 > Wordsworth's specula- 
tions concerning nineteenth- 
century poetry, 298-9; pros- 
pect of social poetry, 299—301 ; 
" effusion of natural sensi- 
bility " more probable, 302-3 ; 
French experiments, 303-4 ; 
as to disappearance of erotic 
poetry, 305-6 ; dramatic 
poetry and symbolism, 306-9 
Essay on Criticism, by Pope, 
Romanticists' attack upon, 

71-4 . 1 

Essay on Genius of Pope, by J. 
Warton, 80-3 

Farquhar, 48 

Fatal Friendship, by C. Trotter, 

47-8 X, T 

Fawcett, Rev. J., 97 
Fenn, Mr., 60 
Fletcher, John, songs of, 35 
For Annie, by E. A. Poe, 112 
Ford, songs of, 35 
Forster, John, 13 1-2, 133 
France, Anatole, 7 

Gaskell, Mrs., 141 

Gautier, T., 6, 10 

Genoa, Duke of, 133 

Georgian poetry, its pre-war 

characteristics, 261-2 
Gibbon, 98 
Gibson, W. W., 262 
Gilbert, Sir H., 25 
Gilpin, 87 

Godolphin, Henrietta, 58 
Goethe, 161 
de Goncourt, E., 252 
Gongora, 78 

Gordon, General, 15; Mr. 

Strachey's portrait of, 329-30 
Gore, Mrs., 178 

de Gourmont, Remy, his opinion 

of Sully-Prudhomme, 9, 10 
de Gournay, Mile., 39 
Granville, 47 



Graves, R., poetry of, 280-1 
Gray, 89, 108 
Greene, 32 

Grenfell, J., poems of, 271-3 
Guiana, Raleigh's " gold mine " 
in, 20 

Halifax, Lord, 50 

Handel, 80 

Harcourt, Mrs., 57 

Hardy, Thomas, lyrical poetry 
of, 233-58; independence of 
his career as a poet, 233-4 > 
unity and consistence of his 
poetry, 234; sympathy with 
Swinburne, 235 ; historic 
development of lyrics, 236; 
novel writing interfering with, 
237-8; place of poetry in his 
literary career, 238; " Wessex 
Ballads " and " Poems of 
Past and Present," 238-40; 
" The Dynasts " and " Times' 
Laughing Stocks " 240-2 ; 
Satires of Circumstance," 

242- 3; " Moments of Vision," 

243- 4 ; technical quality of 
his poetry, 244 ; metrical forms 
245-6; pessimistic conception 
of life, 247-8 ; compared with 
Crabbe, 248 ; consolation 
found by, 249-51 ; compared 
with Wordsworth, 251 ; human 
sympathy, 251 ; range of 
subjects, 252-5; speculations 
on immortality, 256; " The 
Dynasts," 68, 257; unchange- 
ableness of his art, 257-8; 
" Song of the Soldiers," 263 

Hawthorne, 107 
Hayley, 5 
Hazlitt, 301 

Henrietta Temple, by B. Disraeli, 

153, 159 
Heywood, songs of, 35 
Higgons, Bevil, 43 
Hobbes, 98 
Hodgson, W. N., 284 
Homer, 12 
Hooker, 17 
Hope, H. T., 164 
Housman, A. E., 268 



Index 



34i 



Hugo, V., 6, 12, in, 134 
Hume, 98 
Hunt, Leigh, 104 

Inglis, Dr., 51, 58 
Ireland, Raleigh in, 23 

James I, distrust and treatment 

of Raleigh, 19, 20, 21 
James II, 42 

Johnson, Dr., his opinion of the 

Wartons, 86; 98 
Jowett, Dr., 320 

Keats, Mrs. Carlyle's opinion of, 

9; 5, 90, 104, 105 
King, Peter, 53, 59 
Kipling, R., poetry of, 300 

Landon, Letitia, 131 
Lansdowne, Lord, 191 
Lauderdale, Earl of, 42 
Lauderdale, Maitland, Duke of, 
40, 41 

Lawson, H., poems of, 284 
Lee, 50 

Leibnitz, 42, 54, 55, 56, 59 

Lemaitre, J., 7 

Lewis, " Monk," 162 

Locke, Catharine Trotter's 

defence of, 53-5 ; death of, 55 ; 

42 

Lockhart, 135 
Lodge, 32 

Lothair, by B. Disraeli, 173-8 
Love at a Loss, by Catharine 

Trotter, 51 
Lowell, 108 
Lucas, Lord, 274 
Lyly, John, 31 

Lytton, Bulwer-, see Bulwer- 
Lytton. 

Lytton, Lord, biography of 
Bui wer-Ly tton, 117, 11 8-1 9, 
120, 122, 129, 130, 131, 133,137 

Lytton, R., biography of Bulwer- 
Lytton, 118, 121 

Macaulay, Lord, 320-1 
Macpherson, 86 
Malebranche, 52 
Malherbe, 70, 77 
Mallarme, 77, 106 
Malory's Movie d' Arthur, 85 



Manley, Mrs., 44, 45, 46, 61 
Manning, Cardinal, Mr. Strachey's 

portrait of, 323, 330-2 
Manoa, 19 
Mant, 73 

Marinetti, M., 305, 318 
Marini, 78 

Marlborough, Sarah, Duchess of, 
57 

Marlborough, Duke of, Catharine 
Trotter's poem of welcome 
to, 58 

Marlowe, songs of, 34 

Marsh, E., 261 

Masham, Lady, 55, 56, 59 

Massinger, 35 

Melbourne, Lord, 131 

Memories, by Lord Redesdale, 
216, 217, 219, 221 

Milton, influence upon eigh- 
teenth-century poetry, 79; 
82, no 

Mitford, Major Hon. C, 218 
Mockel, A., 112 

Moments of Vision, by T. Hardy, 
243-4 

Monckton-Milnes, Sir R., 133 
Morris, 104 
Myers, F., 320 

Nevill, Lady Dorothy, Open 
Letter to Lady Burghclere on, 
181-96; memoirs of, 181-2; 
writer's friendship with, 152; 
appearance and physical 
strength, 183-4; character- 
istics, 184-5 ; a spectator of 
life, 186-7; attitude to the 
country, 187; wit, conversa- 
tion and correspondence, 187- 
92; relation to literature and 
art, 192-4; emotional nature, 
194-6 

Nevill, Ralph, Memoirs of Lady 

D. Nevill by, 181-2 
Newcastle, Margaret, Duchess 

of, 39 

Nichols, R., poetry of, 276-80 

Nietzsche, 219-20 

Nightingale, Florence, Mr. 

Strachey's Life of, 324 
Norris, John, 52, 53 



342 



Index 



Obermann, 76 

Observations on the Faerie Queene, 

by T. Warton, 84-6 
Ode on the Approach of Summer, 

by T. Warton, 79 
Odes, by J. Warton, 69, 75, 80 
Otway, 50 

Panmure, Lord, 325-6 
Paris, Gaston, 7, 8 
Parnell, 76 
Parr, Dr. S., 120 
Pater, W., 71 
Patmore, C, 237 
Peacock, 104 
Peele, 32 
Peguy, C, 268 

Pelham, by Sir E. Bulwer- 
Lytton, the author of, 117- 

37; 135. 155 

Pepys, S., 27 

Perth, 4th Earl of, 40, 42 

Philip van Artevelde, by H. 
Taylor, 107 

Piers, Lady, 50, 51 

Piers, Sir G., 50 

Pix, Mrs. Mary, 45, 46, 61 

Poe, E. A., centenary of, ad- 
dress on, 103-13; importance 
as a poet ignored, 103 ; original 
want of recognition of, 104-5 ; 
his reaction to unfriendly 
criticism, 105-6; essential 
qualities of his genius, 106-7 ; 
contemporary conception of 
poetry, 107-8; his ideal of 
poetry, 108; influences upon, 
108-9; early verses, poetic 
genius in, 109; melodiousness 
of, 110-11; symbolism of, 
112-13 

Poems and Ballads, by A. C. 

Swinburne, Bulwer-Lytton's 

support of, 133-4 
Poems of Past and Present, by 

T. Hardy, 238-40 
Pope, Romanticists' revolt 

against classicism of, 70-90 ; 68 
Prussia, Sophia Charlotte, Queen 

of, 58 

Rabelais, 90 



Radcliffe, Mrs., 85, 162 

Raleigh, North Carolina, 
foundation of, 25-6 

Raleigh, W., junr., 20 

Raleigh, Sir W., address 
delivered on Tercentenary 
celebration of, 15-27; patriot- 
ism and hatred of Spain, 15- 
17, 21-2; character, 18; ad- 
venturous nature, 18-19; 
James I and, 19-20; his El 
Dorado dreams, 20; fall and 
trial, 21 ; savage aspects of, 
23 ; as a naval strategist, 23- 
4; genius as coloniser, 24-5; 
imprisonment and execution, 
26-7 

Ramsay, Allan, 70 

Redesdale, Lord, last days of, 
216-30; literary career, 216- 
7 ; vitality : pride in author- 
ship and garden, 217-8 ; death 
of son, 218; " Memories, " 
219; loneliness and problem 
of occupying his time, 219-22 ; 
origin of last book, its theme, 
222-4 ; last days, 224-30 

Rene, 76 

Rentoul, L., poems of, 284 
Rette, A., 112 
Reynolds, 104 

Ritson, Joseph, attack upon 
T. Warton, 88-9 

Roanoke, Virginia, British settle- 
ment in, 25 

Roche, Lord and Lady, 23 

Romanticism, Two Pioneers of, 
Joseph and Thomas Warton, 
address on, 65-90 

Romantic movement, features 
of, 71-90 

Rossetti, D. G., 104, 136 

Rousseau, J. J., English Roman- 
ticists' relation to, 68, 69, 75 

Ruskin, 100 

Russell, Odo, 330 

Sainte-Beuve, 6 
Sappho, 84 

Sassoon, S., poems of, 282-4 
Satires of Circumstance, by T. 
Hardy, 242-3 



Index 



343 



Satow, Sir E., 223 
Scott, Sir W., 108, 128, 135 
Scudery, M. de, 39 
Seaman, Sir O., war invective of, 
264 

Selbourne, Lord, 320 
Selden, 98 
Senancour, 74 

Sentimental Journey, The, by 
L. Sterne, 96, 100 

Seventeenth century, English 
women writers of, 39 

Shakespeare, the Songs of, 31- 
5 ; their dramatic value, 31-3 ; 
lyrical qualities, 33-5; com- 
parison with contemporary 
lyricists, 35 ; 17, 82 

Shelley, 74, 104, 108, 162 

Shenstone, 70 

Shepherd of the Ocean, The, 15- 
27 

Shorter, C, 141 

Some Soldier Poets, 261-85; 
outbreak of war poetry, 262- 
3 ; mildness of British Hymns 
of Hate, 264-5 ; military 
influence upon poetic feeling, 
265-6; tendency to dispense 
with form, 266; common 
literary influences, 267-8 ; 
Rupert Brooke, 268-70; J. 
Grenfell, 271-3; M. Baring, 
273-5; N. M. F. Corbett, 275; 
E. W. Tennant, 275; R. 
Nichols, 276-80; R. Graves, 
280-1 ; S. Sassoon, 282-4 ; 
C. H. Sorley, W. N. Hodgson, 
H. Lawson, L. Rentoul, R. E. 
Vernede, 284 

Sorley, C. H., poems of, 284 

Sou they, 5, 104 

Spain, Anglo-Spanish rivalry 
in days of Walter Raleigh, 
16-17, 21-3, 24 
Spenser, 17, 82, 84, 111 
Stephen, Sir Leslie, 106, 237 
Sterne, Laurence, Essay on the 
Charm of, 93-100; birth and 
childhood, 93-4 ; tempera- 
ment, 94-5 ; intellectual 
development, 95-6 ; alterna- 
tion of feeling about, 97; 



English literature's debt to, 

98; his "indelicacy," 99; 

irrelevancy, 99 ; Shandean 

influences upon literature, 100 
Sterne, Mrs., 93 
Sterne, Roger, 93 
Stevenson, R. L., 100 
Strachey, Lytton, "Eminent 

Victorians " by, review of, 

318-32 
Stukeley, Sir L., 21 
Sully-Prudhomme, fluctuations 

in taste as regards, 5-9 
Sumners, Montagu, 39 
Swinburne, A. C, Bulwer-Lytton 

and, 133-4 '> Hardy's sympathy 

with, 235; 68, 81, in 
Symbolism and poetry, 308-9 

Tales of Old Japan, by Lord 
Redesdale, 216 

Tancred, by B. Disraeli, 153 

Taste, fluctuations in, 3-12 ; 
regarding Wordsworth, 3-4 ; 
Mr. Balfour's conclusions, 4- 
5, 10; volte-face concerning 
Sully-Prudhomme, 5-10 

Tea-Table Miscellany, 70 

Temple, Mrs. 

Tennant, E. W., poetry of, 275 
Tennyson, Victorian opinion of, 

320-1 ; 7, 12, 81, 106, 116, 132, 

299 

Thackeray, 144 

The Bamboo Garden, by Lord 

Redesdale, 216 
The Bells, by E. A. Poe, 111 
The Dynasts, by T. Hardy, 240, 

257 

The Enthusiast, by Joseph 
War ton, importance of, 69, 
73 

The Female Wits, by Catharine 

Trotter, 45-6 
The Raven, by E. A. Poe, 108,111 
The Revolution in Sweden, by 

Catharine Trotter, 57-8 
The Unhappy Penitent, by 

Catharine Trotter, 50-1 
The Young Duke, by B. Disraeli, 

153, 157 
Thomson, James, 78, 84, 307 



344 



Index 



Thomson's Castle of Indolence, 68 

Times' Laughing Stocks, by T. 
Hardy, 240-2 

Tottel's Miscellany, 261 

Tristram Shandy, by L. Sterne, 
94, 96, 98, 99, 100 

Trotter, Capt. D., R.N., 40 

Trotter, Catharine, 39-62; pre- 
cocity, 39, 42; parentage, 40; 
poverty, 41-2; early verses, 
43 ; corrrespondence with cele- 
brated people, 43; Agnes de 
Castro, 43-5 ; The Female 
Wits, 45-6; Fatal Friendship, 
47-9 ; elegy on Dryden's death, 
49~5° I The Unhappy Penitent, 
50-1 ; Love at a Loss, 51 ; 
friendship with the Burnets, 
52 ; philosophical studies, 42, 
52-3 ; enthusiasm for Locke, 
53> 55* The Revolution in 
Sweden, 54, 57; correspond- 
ence with Leibnitz, 55 ; indig- 
nation at aspersions on 
feminine intellectuality, 56-7 ; 
poem of welcome to Marl- 
borough, 58; attachment to 
G. Burnet, 59-60; marriage 
with Mr. Cockburn, 60; later 
life, 60-1 

Trotter, Mrs., poverty of, 41 

Tupper, 5 

Turkey Company, 40 

Ulalume, by E. A. Poe, 103, 107, 

109, 112 
Upchear, Henry, 31 

Veluvana, by Lord Redesdale, 
theme of, 222-4, 226 

Venetia, by B. Disraeli, 163 

Venice, its fascination for Dis- 
raeli, 163 

Verbruggen, Mrs., 43 

Verlaine, Paul, 7 

Vernede, R. E., poems of, 284 

de Verville, B., 95, 96 

Victorian Age, the Agony of, 



Vivian Grey, by B. Disraeli, 155, 

156, 157-9 
Voltaire, 3, 162 

Waller, 82 

Warburton, Dr., 33, 81, 97 
Ward, Mrs. Humphrey, 144, 327 
Ward, Plumer, novels of, 155-6, 
178 

Warton, Joseph and Thomas; 
Two Pioneers of Romanticism, 
address on, 65-90 ; parentage 
and early habits, 66-7 ; heralds 
of romantic movement, 67; 
literary contemporaries and 
atmosphere, 68; Joseph, the 
leading spirit, 68-9; The 
Enthusiast, its romantic 
qualities, 69; their revolt 
against principles of classic 
poetry, 70-4 ; characteristic 
features of early Romanticism, 
74-9; Miltonic influence, 79- 
80; Essay on the Genius of 
Pope, 80-4; Observations on 
the Faerie Queene, 84-6 ; John- 
son's criticism of, 86-7; 
Ritson's attack upon Thomas, 
88 ; defects of, 89-90 
Webster's White Devil, 34 
Wessex Ballads, by T. Hardy, 
238-40 

Wheeler, R. D. (Lady Lytton), 
Miss Devey's Life of, 121; 
story of marriage with Bulwer- 
Lytton, 1 2 1-9 
Whitehead, 74 
William III, 41 
Willis, N. P., 105 
Wilson, Harriette, 130-1 
Wolseley, Lord, 328 
Wooler, Miss, 141, 142, 143 
Wordsworth, Hardy compared 
with, 251; speculations con- 
cerning future poetry, 298-9; 
3, 4, 10, 74, 78, 90, 104, 107, 
108, no, 253 
Wycherley, 44 

Yeats, 70 
Young, 68, 69, 81 



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